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MR. WARNER'S WRITINGS. 



MY SUMMER IN A GARDEN. i6mo $1.00 

The Same. Illustrated. Small 4to 1.50 

The Same. Holiday Edition. Illustrated. Full gilt. 3.00 

SAUNTE RINGS. Red edges. 181110 1.25 

BADDECK, AND THAT SORT OF THING. 

Red edges. i8mo 1.00 

BACK-LOG STUDIES. Illustrated. Black and Gold. 

Elegant. Small 4to. New Edition 1.50 

IN THE LEVA NT. One volume. 121110 2.00 

tTust Ready, 

BEING A BOY. Illustrated by " Champ" One vol- 
ume, i&mo 1. 50 



" Inimitable in his way. Humor he has, and of the very highest order. 
It is not broad and boisterous. It is never coarse. It never runs into 
burlesque. It is as delicate as Washington Irving's, and quite as spon- 
taneous. But humor is hardly his predominant quality. He has all the 
wit of Holmes, and all the tenderness of Ik Marvel. While he never 
gushes, and never piles on the agonies of sentiment, he is often charm- 
ingly thoughtful, earnest, and suggestive. He not only pleases, but 
elevates ; not only amuses, but refreshes the soul." — San Francisco 
Bulletin. 



*#* For sale by all Booksellers. ■ Sent, post-paid, on receipt of price by 
the Publishers, 



JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., Boston. 



BEING A BOY 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER, 

AUTHOR OF "MY SUMMER IN A GARDEN," "BACKLOG STUDIES, 

"BADDECK, AND THAT SORT OF THING," 

"SAUNTERINGS," ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED BY "CHAMP." 




E^ii^a 




BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 
1878. 






Copyright, 1877. 
BY JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO. 

All rights reserved. 



University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co. ; 
Cambridge. 



CONTENTS. 

— ♦ — 

Page 

I. Being a Boy i 

II. The Boy as a Farmer .... n 

III. The Delights of Farming .... 21 

IV. No Farming without a Boy ... 31 
V. The Boy's Sunday 42 

VI. The Grindstone of Life .... 53 

VII. Fiction and Sentiment 64 

VIII. The Coming of Thanksgiving ... 76 

IX. The Season of Pumpkin-Pie .... 88 

X. First Experience of the World . . 97 

XI. Home Inventions 109 

XII. The Lonely Farm-House .... 123 

XIII. John's First Party 135 

XIV. The Sugar Camp 150 



vi CONTENTS. 

XV. The Heart of New England . . .163 

XVI. John's Revival 178 

XVII. War 198 

XVIII. Country Scenes 215 

XIX. A Contrast to the New-England Boy . 234 




I. 

BEING A BOY. 

NE of the best 
things in the 
world to be is a 
boy ; it requires 
no experience, though it 
needs some practice to be 
a good one. The disad- 
vantage of the position is 
that it does not last long 
enough ; it is soon over ; just as 
you get used to being a boy, you 
have to be something else, with a 
good deal more work to do and 
not half so much fun. And yet every boy 




2 BEING A BOY. 

is anxious to be a man, and is very uneasy 
with the restrictions that are put upon him as 
a boy. Good fun as it is to yoke up the calves 
and play work, there is not a boy on a farm 
but would rather drive a yoke of oxen at real 
work. What a glorious feeling it is, indeed, 
when a boy is for the first time given the long 
whip and permitted to drive the oxen, walking 
by their side, swinging the long lash, and shout- 
ing " Gee, Buck ! " " Haw, Golden ! " " Whoa, 
Bright ! " and all the rest of that remarkable 
language, until he is red in the face, and all 
the neighbors for half a mile are aware that 
something unusual is going on. If I were a 
boy, I am not sure but I would rather drive 
the oxen than have a birthday. 

The proudest day of my life was one day 
when I rode on the neap of the cart, and 
drove the oxen, all alone, with a load of apples 
to the cider-mill. I was so little, that it was 



DRIVING OXEN. 3 

a wonder that I did n't fall off, and get under 
the broad wheels. Nothing could make a boy, 
who cared anything for his appearance, feel 
flatter than to be run over by the broad tire 
of a cart-wheel. But I never heard of one who 
was, and I don't believe one ever will be. As 
I said, it was a great day for me, but I don't 
remember that the oxen cared much about it. 
They sagged along in their great clumsy way, 
switching their tails in my face occasionally, 
and now and then giving a lurch to this or 
that side of the road, attracted by a choice 
tuft of grass. And then I " came the Julius 
Caesar" over them, if you will allow me to use 
such a slang expression, a liberty I never 
should permit you. I don't know that Julius 
Caesar ever drove cattle, though he must often 
have seen the peasants from the Campagna 
" haw " and " gee " them round the Forum (of 
course in Latin, a language that those cattle 



4 BEING A BOY. 

understood as well as ours do English) ; but 
what I mean is, that I stood up and " hollered " 
with all my might, as everybody does with oxen, 
as if they were born deaf, and whacked them 
with the long lash over the head, just as the 
big folks did when they drove. I think now 
that it was a cowardly thing to crack the pa- 
tient old fellows over the face and eyes, and 
make them wink in their meek manner. If I 
am ever a boy again on a farm, I shall speak 
gently to the oxen, and not go screaming round 
the farm like a crazy man ; and I shall not hit 
them a cruel cut with the lash every few minutes, 
because it looks big to do so and I cannot think 
of anything else to do. I never liked lickings 
myself, and I don't know why an ox should like 
them, especially as he cannot reason about the 
moral improvement he is to get out of them. 

Speaking of Latin reminds me that I once 
taught my cows Latin. I don't mean that I 



LATIN FOR COWS. 



5 



taught them to read it, for it is very difficult to 

teach a cow to read 
Latin or any of the 
~^&/ dead languages, — 
a cow cares more 
for her cud than 
she does for all 
the classics 
put to- 
gether. 




6 BEING A BOY. 

But if you begin early you can teach a cow, 
or a calf (if you can teach a calf anything, 
which I doubt), Latin as well as English. There 
were ten cows,,, which I had to escort to and from 
pasture night and morning. To these cows I 
gave the names of the Roman numerals, begin- 
ning with Unus and Duo, and going up to De- 
cern. Decern was of course the biggest cow of 
the party, or at least she was the ruler of the 
others, and had the place of honor in the stable 
and everywhere else. I admire cows, and espe- 
cially the exactness with which they define their 
social position. In this, case, Decern could 
" lick " Novem, and Novem could " lick " Octo, 
and so on down to Unus, who could n't lick 
anybody, except her own calf. I suppose I 
ought to have called the weakest cow Una in- 
stead of Unus, considering her sex ; but I did n't 
care much to teach the cows the declensions of 
adjectives, in which I was not very well up 



SOCIAL RANK OF COWS. J 

myself; and besides it would be of little use 
to a cow. People who devote themselves too 
severely to study of the classics are apt to be- 
come dried up ; and you should never do any- 
thing to dry up a cow. Well, these ten cows 
knew their names after a while, at least they 
appeared to, and would take their places as I 
called them. At least, if Octo attempted to get 
before Novem in going through the bars (I 
have heard people speak of a " pair of bars " 
when there were six or eight of them), or into 
the stable, the matter of precedence was settled 
then and there, and once settled there was no 
dispute about it afterwards. Novem either put 
her horns into Octo's ribs, and Octo shambled to 
one side, or else the two locked horns and tried 
the game of push and gore until one gave up. 
Nothing is stricter than the etiquette of a party 
of cows. There is nothing in royal courts equal 
to it ; rank is exactly settled, and the same in- 



8 



BEING A BOY. 



dividuals always have the precedence. You 
know that at Windsor Castle,- ^__ 
if the Royal Three- Ply Silver / 

Stick should happen to get 



in front of the Most Royal ^gj 
Double- and -Twisted Golden 
Rod, when the court is going 




in to dinner, something so dreadful would hap- 
pen that we don't dare to think of it. It is 



ROYAL PRECEDENCE. 9 

certain that the soup would get cold while the 
Golden Rod was pitching the Silver Stick out 
of the Castle window into the moat, and perhaps 
the island of Great Britain itself would split in 
two. But the people are very careful that it 
never shall happen, so we shall probably never 
know what the effect would be. Among cows, 
as I say, the question is settled in short order, 
and in a different manner from what it some- 
times is in other society. It is said that in 
other society there is sometimes a great scram- 
ble for the first place, for the leadership as it 
is called, and that women, and men too, fight 
for what is called position ; and in order to "be 
first they will injure their neighbors by telling 
stories about them and by backbiting, which 
is the meanest kind of biting there is, not ex- 
cepting the bite of fleas. But in cow society 
there is nothing of this detraction in order to 
get the first place at the crib, or the farther 



10 BEING A BOY. 

stall in the stable. If the question arises, the 
cows turn in, horns and all, and settle it with 
one square fight, and that ends it. I have often 
admired this trait in cows. 

Besides Latin, I used to try to teach the 
cows a little poetry, and it is a very good plan. 
It does not do the cows much good, but it is 
very good exercise for a boy farmer. I used to 
commit to memory as good short poems as I 
could find (the cows liked to listen to Thana- 
topsis about as well as anything), and repeat 
them when I went to the pasture, and as I drove 
the cows home through the sweet ferns and 
down the rocky slopes. It improves a boy's 
elocution a great deal more than driving oxen. 

It is a fact, also, that if a boy repeats Tha- 
natopsis while he is milking, that operation 
acquires a certain dignity. 



II 



THE BOY AS A FARMER. 





OYS in gen- 
eral would 
be very good 
farmers if 
the current 
notions about farm- 
ing were not so very 
different from those 
they entertain. What 
passes for laziness is 
very often an unwill- 
ingness to farm in a 
particular way. For instance, some morning 
in early summer John is told to catch the sorrel 



12 BEING A BOY. 

mare, harness her into the spring wagon, and 
put in the buffalo and the best whip, for father 
is obliged to drive over to the " Corners, to see a 
man " about some cattle, to talk with the road 
commissioner, to go to the store for the " women 
folks," and to attend to other important business ; 
and very likely he will not be back till sundown. 
It must be very pressing business, for the old 
gentleman drives off in this way somewhere 
almost every pleasant day, and appears to have 
a great deal on his mind. 

Meantime, he tells John that he can play 
ball after he has done up the chores. As if 
the chores could ever be "done up" on a farm. 
He is first to clean out the horse-stable ; then to 
take a bill-hook and cut down the thistles and 
weeds from the fence corners in the home mow- 
ing-lot and along the road towards the village ; 
to dig up the docks round the garden patch ; 
to weed out the beet-bed ; to hoe the early 



DOING UP THE CHORES. 1 3 

potatoes ; to rake the sticks and leaves out of 
the front yard ; in short, there is work enough 
laid out for John to keep him busy, it seems to 
him, till he comes of age ; and at half an hour 
to sundown he is to go for the cows, and, mind 
he don't run 'em ! 

"Yes, sir," says John, "is that all?" 
" Well, if you get through in good season, you 
might pick over those potatoes in the cellar ; 
they are sprouting ; they ain't fit to eat." 

John is obliged to his father, for if there is 
any sort of chore more cheerful to a boy than 
another, on a pleasant day, it is rubbing the 
sprouts off potatoes in a dark cellar. And 
the old gentleman mounts his wagon and drives 
away down the enticing road, with the dog 
bounding along beside the wagon, and refusing 
to come back at John's call. John half wishes 
he were the dog. The dog knows the part of 
farming that suits him. He likes to run along 



14 BEING A BOY. 

the road and see all the dogs and other people, 
and he likes best of all to lie on the store steps 
at the Corners — while his master's horse is 
dozing at the post and his master is talking 
politics in the store — with the other dogs of 
his acquaintance, snapping at mutually annoying- 
flies and indulging in that delightful dog gossip 
which is expressed by a wag of the tail and a 
sniff of the nose. Nobody knows how many 
dogs' characters are destroyed in this gossip ; 
or how a dog may be able to insinuate suspicion 
by a wag of the tail as a man can by a shrug of 
the shoulders, or sniff a slander as a man can 
suggest one by raising his eyebrows. 

John looks after the old gentleman driving 
off in state, with the odorous buffalo-robe and 
the new whip, and he thinks that is the sort 
of farming he would like to do. And he cries 
after his departing parent,— 

" Say, father, can't I go over to the farther 



SALTING THE CATTLE. 



15 



pasture and salt the cattle ? " John 
^C^ik&rff knows that he could spend half a 
rV_ Wz day very pleasantly in going over 
to that pasture, looking for bird's- 
•f^ Up*" nests and shying at red squirrels 
CW on the way, and who knows but he 

might " see " a sucker in the meadow brook, 
and perhaps get a "jab" at him with a sharp 
stick. He knows a hole where there is a whop- 
per ; and one of his plans in life is to go some 
day and snare him, and 
bring him home in tri- 
umph. It therefore is 
strongly impressed upon 
his mind that the cattle ~ 



want salting. But his 
father, without turning 
his head, replies, — 

" No, they don't need 
salting any more 'n you 




^^^ 



1 6 BEING A BOY. 

do ! " And the old equipage goes rattling down 
the road, and John whistles his disappointment. 
When I was a boy on a farm, and I suppose it 
is so now, cattle were never salted half enough. 

John goes to his chores, and gets through 
the stable as soon as he can, for that must be 
done ; but when it comes to the out-door work, 
that rather drags. There are so many things 
to distract the attention, — a chipmunk in the 
fence, a bird on a near tree, and a hen-hawk 
circling high in the air over the barn-yard. 
John loses a little time in stoning the chipmunk, 
which rather likes the sport, and in watching 
the bird to find where its nest is ; and he con- 
vinces himself that he ought to watch the hawk, 
lest it pounce upon the chickens, and therefore, 
with an easy conscience, he spends fifteen min- 
utes in hallooing to that distant bird, and follows 
it away out of sight over the woods, and then 
wishes it would come back again. And then 



A BOY'S NOTION OF CHORES. iy 

a carriage with two horses, and a trunk on 
behind, goes along the road ; and there is a girl 
in the carriage who looks out at John, who is 
suddenly aware that his trousers are patched 
on each knee and in two places behind ; and 
he wonders if she is rich, and whose name is on 
the trunk, and how much the horses cost, and 
whether that nice-looking man is the girl's 
father, and if that boy on the seat with the 
driver is her brother, and if he has to do 
chores ; and as the gay sight disappears John 
falls to thinking about the great world beyond 
the farm, of cities, and people who are always 
dressed up, and a great many other things of 
which he has a very dim notion. And then a 
boy, whom John knows, rides by in a wagon 
with his father, and the boy makes a face at 
John, and John returns the greeting with a 
twist of his own visage and some symbolic 
gestures. All these things take time. The 



i8 



BEING A BOY. 



work of cutting down the big weeds gets on 
slowly, although it is not very disagreeable, or 
would not be if it were play. 
John imagines that yonder big 
thistle is some whiskered villain, 
of whom he has read in a fairy 
book, and 

he ad van- ^\r 

ces on him 
with "Die, 
ruffian!" 
and slash- 
es off his 
head with 
the bill- 
hook ; or 
he charges 
upon the 

rows of mullein-stalks as if they were rebels in 
regimental ranks, and hews them down without 




HEROIC BUSH-WHACKING. 1 9 

mercy. What fun it might be if there were 
only another boy there to help. But even war, 
single handed, gets to be tiresome. It is dinner- 
time before John finishes the weeds, and it is 
cow-time before John has made much impression ■ 
on the garden. 

This garden John has no fondness for. He 
would rather hoe corn all day than work in it. 
Father seems to think that it is easy work that 
John can do, because it is near the house ! 
John's continual plan in this life is to go fishing. 
When there comes a rainy day, he attempts to 
carry it out. But ten chances to one his father 
has different views. As it rains so that work 
cannot be done out doors, it is a good time to 
work in the garden. He can run into the 
house between the heavy showers. John ac- 
cordingly detests the garden ; and the only 
time he works briskly in it is when he has a 
stent set, to do so much weeding before the 



20 BEING A BOY. 

Fourth of July. If he is spry he can make 
an extra holiday the Fourth and the day after. 
Two days of gunpowder and ball-playing ! 
When I was a boy, I supposed there was some 
connection between such and such an amount 
of work done on the farm and our national free- 
dom. I doubted if there could be any Fourth 
of July if my stent was not done. I, at least, 
worked for my Independence. 




III. 

THE DELIGHTS OF FARMING. 




HERE are so 
many bright 
spots in the 
life of a farm- 
boy, that I 
sometimes 
think I should like to 
live the life over again ; 
I should almost be will- 
ing to be a girl if it 
were not for the chores. 
There is a great com- 
fort to a boy in the 
amount of work he can 
get rid of doing. It is 



22 BEING A BOY. 

sometimes astonishing how slow he can go on 
an errand, he who leads the school in a race. 
The world is new and interesting to him, and 
there is so much to take his attention off, when 
he is sent to do anything. Perhaps he could n't 
explain, himself, why, when he is sent to the 
neighbor's after yeast, he stops to stone the 
frogs ; he is not exactly cruel, but he wants to 
see if he can hit 'em. No other living thing 
can go so slow as a boy sent on an errand. 
His legs seem to be lead, unless he happens to 
espy a woodchuck in an adjoining lot, when he 
gives chase to it like a deer ; and it is a curious 
fact about boys, that two will be a great deal 
slower in doing anything than one, and that 
the more you have to help on a piece of work 
the less is accomplished. Boys have a great 
power of helping each other to do nothing; and 
they are so innocent about it, and unconscious. 
" I went as quick as ever I could," says the 



GOING FOR THE COWS. 23 

boy: his father asks him why he did n't stay 
all night, when he has been absent three hours 
on a ten-minute errand. The sarcasm has no 
effect on the boy. 

Going after the cows was a serious thing in 
my day. I had to climb a hill, which was covered 
with wild strawberries in the season. Could 
any boy pass by those ripe berries ? And then 
in the fragrant hill pasture there were beds of 
wintergreen with red berries,, tufts of columbine, 
roots of sassafras to be dug, and dozens of things 
good to eat or to smell, that I could not resist. 
It sometimes even lay in my way to climb a 
tree to look for a crow's nest, or to swing in 
the top, and to try if I could see the steeple of 
the village church. It became very important 
sometimes for me to see that steeple ; and in 
the midst of my investigations the tin horn 
would blow a great blast from the farm-house, 
which would send a cold chill down my back 



24 BEING A BOY. 

in the hottest days. I knew what it meant. 
It had a frightfully impatient quaver in it, not 
at all like the sweet note that called us to din- 
ner from the hay-field. It said, " Why on earth 
does n't that boy come home ? It is almost dark, 
and the cows ain't milked ! " And that was 
the time the cows had to start into a brisk 
pace and make up for lost time. I wonder if 
any boy ever drove the cows home late, who 
did not say that the cows were at the very far- 
ther end of the pasture, and that "Old Brindle" 
was hidden in the woods, and he could n't find 
her for ever so long! The brindle cow is the 
boy's scape-goat, many a time. 

No other boy knows how to appreciate a 
holiday as the farm-boy does ; and his best 
ones are of a peculiar kind. Going fishing is 
of course one sort. The excitement of rigging 
up the tackle, digging the bait, and the antici- 
pation of great luck ; these are pure pleasures, 



A HOLIDAY ADVENTURE. 



25 



enjoyed because they are rare. Boys 
who can go a-fishing any time care 
but little for it. Tramping all day 
through bush and brier, fighting flies 
and mosquitoes, and branches that 
tangle the line, and snags that break 
the hook, and returning home late 
and hungry, with 
wet feet and a 
string of speckled 
trout on a willow 
twig, and having 
the family crowd 
out at the kitchen 
door to look at 'em, 
and say, " Pretty 
well done for you, 
bub ; did you catch 
that big one your- 
self?" — this is also pure happiness, the like 







26 BEING A BOY. 

of which the boy will never have again, not if 
he comes to be selectman and deacon and to 
"keep store." 

But the holidays I recall with delight were 
the two days in spring and fall, when we went 
to the distant pasture-land, in a neighboring 
town, maybe, to drive thither the young cattle 
and colts, and to bring them back again. It 
was a wild and rocky upland where our great 
pasture was, many miles from home, the road 
to it running by a brawling river, and up a 
dashing brookside among great hills. What a 
day's adventure it was ! It was like a journey 
to Europe. The night before, I could scarcely 
sleep for thinking of it, and there was no trouble 
about getting me up at sunrise that morning. 
The breakfast was eaten, the luncheon was 
packed in a large basket, with bottles of root 
beer and a jug of switchel, which packing I 
superintended with the greatest interest ; and 






A MARCH OF TRIUMPH. 2J 

then the cattle were to be collected for the 
march, and the horses hitched up. Did I shirk 
any duty ? Was I slow ? I think not. I was 
willing to run my legs off after the frisky steers, 
who seemed to have an idea they were going 
on a lark, and frolicked about, dashing into all 
gates, and through all bars except the right 
ones ; and how cheerfully I did yell at them ; 
it was a glorious chance to " holler," and I have 
never since heard any public speaker on the 
stump or at camp-meeting who could make 
more noise. I have often thought it fortunate 
that the amount of noise in a boy does not in- 
crease in proportion to his size ; if it did the 
world could not contain it. 

The whole day was full of excitement and 
of freedom. We were away from the farm, 
which to a boy is one of the best parts of farm- 
ing ; we saw other farms and other people at 
work ; I had the pleasure of marching along, 



28 BEING A BOY. 

and swinging my whip, past boys whom I knew, 
who were picking up stones. Every turn of 
the road, every bend and rapid of the river, 
the great bowlders by the wayside, the water- 
ing-troughs, the giant pine that had been struck 
by lightning, the mysterious covered bridge 
over the river where it was most swift and 
rocky and foamy, the chance eagle in the blue 
sky, the sense of going somewhere, — why, as 
I recall all these things I feel that even the 
Prince Imperial, as he used to dash on horse- 
back through the Bois de Boulogne, with fifty 
mounted hussars clattering at his heels, and 
crowds of people cheering, could not have been 
as happy as was I, a boy in short jacket and 
shorter pantaloons, trudging in the dust that 
day behind the steers and colts, cracking my 
black-stock whip. 

I wish the journey would never end ; but at 
last, by noon, we reach the pastures and turn 



A LUNCHEON IN THE HILLS. 



2 9 



in the herd ; and after making 
the tour of the lots to make 
sure there are no breaks 
in the fences, we take 
, our luncheon from 
the wagon and eat it 
under the trees by the 
spring. This is the su- 
preme moment of the day. 
This is the way to live ; this 




3<D BEING A BOY. 

is like the Swiss Family Robinson, and all the 
rest of my delightful acquaintances in romance. 
Baked beans, rye-and-indian bread (moist, re- 
member), doughnuts and cheese, pie, and root 
beer. What richness ! You may live to dine 
at Delmonico's, or, if those Frenchmen do not 
eat each other up, at Philippe's, in the Rue 
Montorgueil in Paris, where the dear old Thack- 
eray used to eat as good a dinner as anybody ; 
but you will get there neither doughnuts, nor 
pie, nor root beer, nor anything so good as that 
luncheon at noon in the old pasture, high among 
the Massachusetts hills ! Nor will you ever, if 
you live to be the oldest boy in the world, 
have any holiday equal to the one I have de- 
scribed. But I always regretted that I did not 
take along a fish-line, just to " throw in " the 
brook we passed. I know there were trout 
there. 



IV. 

NO FARMING WITHOUT A BOY. 




AY what 

you will 

about the 

general 

usefulness of 

boys, it is my 

impression that 

a farm without 

a boy would 

very soon come 

to grief. What 

the boy does is 

the life of the 

farm. He is the factotum, 

always in demand, always 



32 BEING A BOY, 

expected to do the thousand indispensable things 
that nobody else will do. Upon him fall all the 
odds and ends, the most difficult things. After 
everybody else is through, he has to finish up. 
His work is like a woman's, — perpetual wait- 
ing on others. Everybody knows how much 
easier it is to eat a good dinner than it is to 
wash the dishes afterwards. Consider what a 
boy on a farm is required to do ; things that 
must be done, or life would actually stop. 

It is understood, in the first place, that he is 
to do all the errands, to go to the store, to the 
post-office, and to carry all sorts of messages. 
If he had as many legs as a centipede, they 
would tire before night. His two short limbs 
seem to him entirely inadequate to the task. He 
would like to have as many legs as a wheel has 
spokes, and rotate about in the same way. This 
he sometimes tries to do ; and people who have 
seen him " turning cart-wheels " along the side 



THE IDLE FELLOW. 



33 



of the road have supposed that he was amusing 
himself, and idling his time ; he was only trying 
to invent a new mode of locomotion, so that he 
could economize his legs and do his errands 
with greater despatch. He practices standing 
on his head, in order to accustom himself to any 
position. Leap-frog is one of his methods of 
getting over the ground quickly. He would 
willingly go an errand any distance if he could 
leap-frog it with a few other boys. He has a 
natural genius for combining pleasure with busi- 
ness. This is the reason why, when he is sent 
to the spring for a pitcher of water, and the 
family are waiting at the dinner-table, he is 
absent so long; for he stops to poke the frog 
that sits on the stone, or, if there is a penstock, 
to put his hand over the spout and squirt the 
water a little while. He is the one who spreads 
the grass when the men have cut it ; he mows 
it away in the barn ; he rides the horse to culti- 
vate the corn, up and down the hot, weary 



34 BEING A BOY. 

rows ; he picks up the potatoes when they are 
dug ; he drives the cows night and morning ; 
he brings wood and water and splits kindling; 
he gets up the horse and puts out the horse ; 
whether he is in the house or out of it, there is 
always something for him to do. Just before 
school in winter he shovels paths ; in summer 
he turns the grindstone. He knows where there 
are lots of wintergreens and sweet flag-root, but 
instead of going for them, he is to stay in doors 
and pare apples and stone raisins and pound 
something in a mortar. And yet, with his mind 
full of schemes of what he would like to do, 
and his hands full of occupations, he is an idle 
boy who has nothing to busy himself with but 
school and chores ! He would gladly do all the 
work if somebody else would do the chores, he 
thinks, and yet I doubt if any boy ever amounted 
to anything in the world, or was of much use as 
a man, who did not enjoy the advantages of a 
liberal education in the way of chores. 



THE CIVILIZED FOX. 



35 



A boy on a farm is nothing without his pets ; 
at least a dog, and probably rabbits, chickens, 
ducks, and guinea-hens. A guinea-hen suits a 
boy. It is entirely useless, and makes a more 
disagreeable noise than a Chinese gong. I once 
domesticated a young fox which a neighbor had 
caught. It is a mistake to suppose the fox can- 
not be tarn ed. 
Jacko was a very 
clever little animal, 
and behaved, in all 




36 BEING A BOY. 

respects, with propriety. He kept Sunday as 
well as any day, and all the ten commandments 
that he could understand. He was a very grace- 
ful playfellow, and seemed to have an affection 
for me. He lived in a wood-pile, in the door- 
yard, and when I lay down at the entrance to 
his house and called him, he would come out 
and sit on his tail and lick my face just like a 
grown person. I taught him a great many 
tricks and all the virtues. That year I had a 
large number of hens, and Jacko went about 
among them with the most perfect indifference, 
never looking on them to lust after them, as I 
could see, and never touching an egg or a 
feather. So excellent was his reputation that I 
would have trusted him in the hen-roost in the 
dark without counting the hens. In short, he 
was domesticated, and I was fond of him and 
very proud of him, exhibiting him to all our 
visitors as an example of what affectionate treat- 



THE USE OF A DOG. 37 

ment would do in subduing the brute instincts. 
I preferred him to my dog, whom I had, with 
much patience, taught to go up a long hill alone 
and surround the cows, and drive them home 
from the remote pasture. He liked the fun of 
it at first, but by and by he seemed to get the 
notion that it was a " chore," and when I whistled 
for him to go for the cows, he would turn tail 
and run the other way, and the more I whistled 
and threw stones at him the faster he would 
run. His name was Turk, and I should have 
sold him if he had not been the kind of dog 
that nobody will buy. I suppose he was not a 
cow-dog, but what they call a sheep-dog. At 
least, when he got big enough, he used to get 
into the pasture and chase the sheep to death. 
That was the way he got into trouble, and lost 
his valuable life. A dog is of great use on a 
farm, and that is the reason a boy likes him. 
He is good to bite pedlers and small children, 



38 BEING A BOY. 

and run out and yelp at wagons that pass by, 
and to howl all night when the moon shines. 
And yet, if I were a boy again, the first thing 
I would have should be a dog ; for dogs are 
great companions, and as active and spry as a 
boy at doing nothing. They are also good to 
bark at woodchuck-holes. 

A good dog will bark at a woodchuck-hole 
long after the animal has retired to a remote 
part of his residence, and escaped by another 
hole. This deceives the woodchuck. Some of 
the most delightful hours of my life have been 
spent in hiding and watching the hole where 
the dog was not. What an exquisite thrill ran 
through my frame when the timid nose appeared, 
was withdrawn, poked out again, and finally fol- 
lowed by the entire animal, who looked cau- 
tiously about, and then hopped away to feed on 
the clover. At that moment I rushed in, occu- 
pied the " home base," yelled to Turk and then 



THE DOG AND THE WOODCHUCK. 39 

danced with delight at the combat between the 
spunky woodchuck and the dog. They were 
about the same size, but science and civilization 
won the day. I did not reflect then that it 
would have been more in the interest of civiliza- 
tion if the woodchuck had killed the dog. I do 
not know why it is that boys so like to hunt and 
kill animals ; but the excuse that I gave in this 
case for the murder was, that the woodchuck ate 
the clover and trod it down ; and, in fact, was a 
woodchuck. It was not till long after that I 
learned with surprise that he is a rodent mammal, 
of the species Arctomys monax, is called at the 
West a ground-hog, and is eaten by people of 
color with great relish. 

But I have forgotten my beautiful fox. Jacko 
continued to deport himself well until the young 
chickens came ; he was actually cured of the 
fox vice of chicken-stealing. He used to go 
with me about the coops, pricking up his ears 



40 



BEING A BOY. 



in an intelligent manner, and with a demure 
eye and the most virtuous droop of the tail. 
Charming fox ! If he had held out a little while 
longer, I should have put him into a Sunday- 
school book. But I began to miss chickens. 
They disappeared mysteriously in the night. I 
would not suspect Jacko 
at first, for he looked so 
honest, and in the day- 
time seemed to be as 
much interested in the 
chickens as I was. But 
one morning, 
when I 



^went to 




*&,£a>^ cal1 him > 



«&?. 



-Ay -^> -, j found 

feathers at the entrance of his hole, — chicken 
feathers. He could n't deny it. He was a 
thief. His fox nature had come out under se- 






MELANCHOLY END OF THE FOX. 41 

vere temptation. And he died an unnatural 
death. He had a thousand virtues and one 
crime. But that crime struck at the foundation 
of society. He deceived and stole ; he was a 
liar and a thief, and no pretty ways could hide 
the fact. His intelligent, bright face could n't 
save him. If he had been honest, he might 
have grown up to be a large, ornamental fox. 




V. 



THE BOY'S SUNDAY. 




UNDAY in 

the New 
England hill 
towns used 
to begin Sat- 
urday night 
at sundown ; 
and the sun is lost to 
sight behind the hills 
there before it has set 
by the almanac. I re- 
member that we used 
to go by the almanac 
Saturday night and 
by the visible disap- 
pearance Sunday 
night. On Saturday 



KEEPING SA TURD A Y NIGHT. 43 

night we very slowly yielded to the influences 
of the holy time, which were settling down 
upon us, and submitted to the ablutions which 
were as inevitable as Sunday ; but when the 
sun (and it never moved so slow) slid behind 
the hills Sunday night, the effect upon the 
watching boy was like a shock from a galvanic 
battery ; something flashed through all his limbs 
and set them in motion, and no " play " ever 
seemed so sweet to him as that between sun- 
down and dark Sunday night. This, however, 
was on the supposition that he had conscien- 
tiously kept Sunday, and had not gone in swim- 
ming and got drowned. This keeping of Satur- 
day night instead of Sunday night we did not 
very well understand ; but it seemed, on the 
whole, a good thing that we should rest Sat- 
urday night when we were tired, and play Sun- 
day night when we were rested. I supposed, 
however, that it was an arrangement made to 



44 BEING A BOY. 

suit the big boys who wanted to go "courting" 
Sunday night. Certainly they were not to be 
blamed, for Sunday was the day when pretty 
girls were most fascinating, and I have never 
since seen any so lovely as those who used to 
sit in the gallery and in the singers' seats in 
the bare old meeting-houses. 

Sunday to the country farmer-boy was hardly 
the relief that it was to the other members of the 
family ; for the same chores must be done that 
day as on others, and he could not divert his 
mind with whistling, hand-springs, or sending 
the dog into the river after sticks. He had to 
submit, in the first place, to the restraint of 
shoes and stockings. He read in the Old Tes- 
tament that when Moses came to holy ground 
he put off his shoes ; but the boy was obliged 
to put his on, upon the holy day, not only to 
go to meeting, but while he sat at home. Only 
the emancipated country-boy, who is as agile 



i 



CATCHING THE HORSE. 45 

on his bare feet as a young kid, and rejoices 
in the pressure of the warm soft earth, knows 
what a hardship it is to tie on stiff shoes. 
The monks who put peas in their shoes as a 
penance do not suffer more than the country- 
boy in his penitential Sunday shoes. I recall 
the celerity with which he used to kick them 
off at sundown. 

Sunday morning was not an idle one for the 
farmer-boy. He must rise tolerably early, for 
the cows were to be milked and driven to pas- 
ture ; family prayers were a little longer than 
on other days ; there were the Sunday-school 
verses to be re-learned, for they did not stay 
in mind over night ; perhaps the wagon was to 
be greased before the neighbors began to drive 
by ; and the horse was to be caught out of the 
pasture, ridden home bare-back, and harnessed. 
This catching the horse, perhaps two of them, 
was very good fun usually, and would have 



4 6 



BEING A BOY. 



broken the Sunday if the horse had not been 
wanted for taking the family to meeting. It 
was so peaceful and still in the 
^y\ pasture on Sunday morning ; 
'=*&£ v but the horses were never so 
playful, the colts never so 







frisky. Round and 
round the lot the 
boy went calling, 
in an entreating 
S u n d ay voice, 
"Jock, jock, jock, 
jock," and shaking his salt-dish, while the horses, 
with heads erect, and shaking tails and flash- 
ing heels, dashed from corner to corner, and 



RIDING TO CHURCH. 47 

gave the boy a pretty good race before he could 
coax the nose of one of them into his dish. 
The boy got angry, and came very near saying 
" dum it," but he rather enjoyed the fun, after all. 
The boy remembers how his mother's anxiety 
was divided between the set of his turn-over 
collar, the parting of his hair, and his memory 
of the Sunday-school verses ; and what a wild 
confusion there was through the house in get- 
ting off for meeting, and how he was kept run- 
ning hither and thither, to get the hymn-book, 
or a palm-leaf fan, or the best whip, or to pick 
from the Sunday part of the garden the bunch 
of caraway-seed. Already the deacon's mare, 
with a wagon-load of the deacon's folks, had 
gone shambling past, head and tail drooping, 
clumsy hoofs kicking up clouds of dust, while 
the good deacon sat jerking the reins, in an 
automatic way, and the " women-folks " patiently 
saw the dust settle upon their best summer 



4 8 



BEING A BOY. 



finery. Wagon after wagon went along the 
sandy road, and when our 
boy's family started, they 
became part of a long 
procession, which sent 
up a mile of dust 
y> and a pungent, if 

pious smell 




of buffalo-robes. There were fiery horses in th< 



THE COUNTRY MEETING-HOUSE. 49 

train which had to be held in, for it was neither 
etiquette nor decent to pass anybody on Sun- 
day. It was a great delight to the farmer-boy 
to see all this procession of horses, and to ex- 
change sly winks with the other boys, who 
leaned over the wagon-seats for that purpose. 
Occasionally a boy rode behind, with his back 
to the family, and his pantomime was always 
something wonderful to see, and was considered 
very daring and wicked. 

The meeting-house which our boy remem- 
bers was a high, square building, without a 
steeple. Within, it had a lofty pulpit, with doors 
underneath and closets where sacred things were 
kept, and where the tithing-men were supposed 
to imprison bad boys. The pews were square, 
with seats facing each other, those on one side 
low for the children, and all with hinges, so 
that they could be raised when the congrega- 
tion stood up for prayers and leaned over the 
backs of the pews, as horses meet each other 



50 BEING A BOY. 

across a pasture fence. After prayers these 
seats used to be slammed down with a long- 
continued clatter, which seemed to the boys 
about the best part of the exercises. The gal- 
leries were very high, and the singers' seats, 
where the pretty girls sat, were the most con- 
spicuous of all. To sit in the gallery away from 
the family, was a privilege 
P y not often granted to the 
boy. The tithing-man who 
*%0k lllS^ carried a long rod and kept 

j/ljj 1HS order in the house, and out 
;, doors at noontime, sat in the 
/' gallery, and visited any boy 

who whispered or found curious passages in the 
Bible and showed them to another boy. It 
was an awful moment when the bushy-headed 
tithing-man approached a boy in sermon-time. 
The eyes of the whole congregation were on 
him, and he could feel the guilt ooze out of his 
burning face. 




HOW NOONING WAS SPENT. 5 1 

At noon was Sunday-school, and after that, 
before the afternoon service, in summer, the 
boys had a little time to eat their luncheon to- 
gether at the watering-trough, where some of 
the elders were likely to be gathered, talking 
very solemnly about cattle ; or they went over 
to a neighboring barn to see the calves ; or they 
slipped off down the roadside to a place where 
they could dig sassafras or the root of the sweet- 
flag, — roots very fragrant in the mind of many 
a boy with religious associations to this day. 
There was often an odor of sassafras in the 
afternoon service. It used to stand in my mind 
as a substitute for the Old Testament incense 
of the Jews. Something in the same way the 
big bass-viol in the choir took the place of 
" David's harp of solemn sound." 

The going home from meeting was more 
cheerful and lively than the coming to it. There 
was all the bustle of getting the horses out of 



52 BEING A BOY. 

the sheds and bringing them round to the meet- 
ing-house steps. At noon the boys sometimes 
sat in the wagons and swung the whips with- 
out cracking them : now it was permitted to 
give them a little snap in order to bring the 
horses up in good style ; and the boy was 
rather proud of the horse if it pranced a little 
while the timid "women-folks" were trying to 
get in. The boy had an eye for whatever life 
and stir there was in a New England Sunday. 
He liked to drive home fast. The old house 
and the farm looked pleasant to him. There 
was an extra dinner when they reached home, 
and a cheerful consciousness of duty performed 
made it a pleasant dinner. Long before sun- 
down the Sunday-school book had been read, 
and the boy sat waiting in the house with great 
impatience the signal that the " day of rest " was 
over. A boy may not be very wicked, and yet 
not see the need of "rest." Neither his idea of 
rest nor work is that of older farmers. 



PIS P w>M»- **' 

es tiitf 



VI. 

THE GRINDSTONE OF LIFE. 

F there is 
one thing 
more than 
another that 
hardens the 
lot of the 
farmer-boy, it 
is the grind- 
stone. Turn- 
ing grindstones 
$r to grind scythes 
is one of those 
heroic but unobtrusive occupations for which 
one gets no credit. It is a hopeless kind 




54 BEING A BOY. 

of task, and, however faithfully the crank is 
turned, it is one that brings little reputation. 
There is a great deal of poetry about haying 
— I mean for those not engaged in it. One 
likes to hear the whetting of the scythes on 
a fresh morning and the response of the noisy 
bobolink, who always sits upon the fence and 
superintends the cutting of the dew-laden grass. 
There is a sort of music in the " swish " and 
a rhythm in the swing of the scythes in con- 
cert. The boy has not much time to attend 
to it, for it is lively business "spreading" 
after half a dozen men who have only to walk 
along and lay the grass low, while the boy 
has the whole hay-field on his hands. He 
has little time for the poetry of haying, as 
he struggles along, filling the air with the wet 
mass which he shakes over his head, and pick- 
ing his way with short legs and bare feet amid 
the short and freshly cut stubble. 






HO W TO TURN A GRINDSTONE. 55 

But if the scythes cut well and swing merrily 
it is due to the boy who turned the grindstone. 
O, it was nothing to do, just turn the grind- 
stone a few minutes for this and that one before 
breakfast ; any " hired man " was authorized to 
order the boy to turn the grindstone. How they 
did bear on, those great strapping fellows ! Turn, 
turn, turn, what a weary go it was. For my 
part, I used to like a grindstone that " wabbled " 
a good deal on its axis, for when I turned it 
fast, it put the grinder on a lively lookout for 
cutting his hands, and entirely satisfied his de- 
sire that I should "turn faster." It was some 
sport to make the water fly and wet the grinder, 
suddenly starting up quickly and surprising him 
when I was turning very slowly. I used to 
wish sometimes that I could turn fast enough to 
make the stone fly into a dozen pieces. Steady 
turning is what the grinders like, and any boy 
who turns steadily, so as to give an even mo- 



56 BEING A BOY. 

tion to the stone, will be much praised, and will 
be in demand. I advise any boy who desires 
to do this sort of work to turn steadily. If he 
does it by jerks and in a fitful manner, the 
" hired men " will be very apt to dispense with 
his services and turn the grindstone for each 
other. 

This is one of the most disagreeable tasks of 
the boy farmer, and, hard as it is, I do not 
know why it is supposed to belong especially 
to childhood. But it is, and one of the certain 
marks that second childhood has come to a 
man on a farm is that he is asked to turn the 
grindstone as if he were a boy again. When 
the old man is good for nothing else, when he 
can neither mow nor pitch, and scarcely " rake 
after," he can turn grindstone, and it is in this 
way that he renews his youth. " Ain't you 
ashamed to have your granther turn the grind- 
stone?" asks the hired man of the boy. So 



A BOY HAS NO TIME OF HIS OWN. 57 

the boy takes hold and turns himself, till his 
little back aches. When he gets older he wishes 
he had replied, " Ain't you ashamed to make 
either an old man or a little boy do such hard 
grinding work ? " 

Doing the regular work of this world is not 
much, the boy thinks, but the wearisome part 
is the waiting on the people who do the work. 
And the boy is not far wrong. This is what 
women and boys have to do on a farm, wait 
upon everybody who " works." The trouble 
with the boy's life is that he has no time that 
he can call his own. He is, like a barrel of 
beer, always on draft. The men-folks, having 
worked in the regular hours, lie down 
and rest, stretch themselves idly in 
the shade at noon, or lounge about 
after supper. Then the boy, who has 
done nothing all day but turn grind- 
stone, and spread hay, and rake after, and run 




58 BEING A BOY. 

his little legs off at everybody's beck and call, 
is sent on some errand or some household chore, 
in order that time shall not hang heavy on his 
hands. The boy comes ■ nearer to perpetual 
motion than anything else in nature, only it is 
not altogether a voluntary motion. The time 
that the farm-boy gets for his own is usually 
at the end of a stent. We used to be given a 
certain piece of corn to hoe, or a certain quan- 
tity of corn to husk in so many days. If we 
finished the task before the time set, we had 
the remainder to ourselves. In my day it used 
to take very sharp work to gain anything, but 
we were always anxious to take the chance. I 
think we enjoyed the holiday in anticipation 
quite as much as we did when we had won it. 
Unless it was training-day, or Fourth of July, 
or the circus was coming, it was a little diffi- 
cult to find anything big enough to fill our 
anticipations of the fun we would have in the 



GOING TO STORE. 



59 



day or the two or three days we had earned. 
We did not want to waste the time on any 
common thing. Even going fishing in one of 
the wild mountain brooks was hardly up to 
the mark, for we could sometimes do that on 
a rainy day. Going down to the village store 
was not very exciting, and was on the whole a 
waste of our precious time. Unless we could get 
out our military company, life was apt to be a 
little blank, even on the holidays for which we 
had worked so hard. If you went to see an- 
other boy, he was probably at work in the hay- 
field or the potato-patch, and his father looked 
at you askance. You sometimes took hold and 
helped him, so that he could go and play with 
you ; but it was usually time to go for the 
cows before the task was done. The fact is, or 
used to be, that the amusements of a boy in 
the country are not many. Snaring " suckers " 
out of the deep meadow brook used to be about 



60 BEING A BOY. 

as good as any that I had. The North Amer- 
ican sucker is not an engaging animal in all 
respects ; his body is comely enough, but his 
mouth is puckered up like that of a purse. The 
mouth is not formed for the gentle angle-worm 
nor the delusive fly of the fishermen. It is 
necessary therefore to snare the fish, if you want 
him. In the sunny days he lies in the deep 
pools, by some big stone or near the bank, pois- 
ing himself quite still, or only stirring his fins 
a little now and then, as an elephant moves 
his ears. He will lie so for hours, or rather 
float, in perfect idleness and apparent bliss. 
The boy who also has a holiday, but cannot 
keep still, comes along and peeps over the bank. 
" Golly, ain't he a big one ! " Perhaps he is 
eighteen inches long, and weighs two or three 
pounds. He lies there among his friends, little 
fish and big ones, quite a school of them, per- 
haps a district school, that only keeps in warm 



THE GENTLE SUCKER AT HOME. 



6l 



days in the summer. The pupils seem to have 
little to learn, except to balance themselves 
and to turn gracefully with a flirt of the tail. 

Not much is taught 
but " deportment," 
and some of the old 
suckers are perfect 

r\r' y 







rZ^y 




Turveydrops in that. 
The boy is armed 
with a pole and a 



62 BEING A BOY. 

stout line, and on the end of it a brass wire 
bent into a hoop, which is a slipnoose, and 
slides together when anything is caught in it. 
The boy approaches the bank and looks over. 
There he lies, calm as a whale. The boy de- 
vours him with his eyes. He is almost too 
much excited to drop the snare into the water 
without making a noise. A puff of wind comes 
and ruffles the surface, so that he cannot see 
the fish. It is calm again, and there he still is, 
moving his fins in peaceful security. The boy 
lowers his snare behind the fish and slips it 
along. He intends to get it around him just 
back of the gills and then elevate him with a 
sudden jerk. It is a delicate operation, for the 
snare will turn a little, and if it hits the fish 
he is off. However, it goes well, the wire is 
almost in place, when suddenly the fish, as if 
he had a warning in a dream, for he appears to 
see nothing, moves his tail just a little, glides 



SNARING A SUCKER. 63 

out of the loop, and with no seeming appearance 
of frustrating any one's plans, lounges over to 
the other side of the pool ; and there he re- 
poses just as if he was not spoiling the boy's 
holiday. This slight change of base on the 
part of the fish requires the boy to reorganize 
his whole campaign, get a new position on the 
bank, a new line of approach, and patiently 
wait for the wind and sun before he can lower 
his line. This time, cunning and patience are 
rewarded. The hoop encircles the unsuspect- 
ing fish. The boy's eyes almost start from his 
head as he gives a tremendous jerk, and feels 
by the dead-weight that he has got him fast. 
Out he comes, up he goes in the air, and the 
boy runs to look at him. In this transaction, 
however, no one can be more surprised than 
the sucker. 



VII. 

FICTION AND SENTIMENT. 




HE boy farmer 
does not ap- 
p r e c i a t e 
school vaca- 
tions as high- 
ly as his 
city cousin. 
When school 
keeps he has 
only to "do 
chores and 
go to school," 
but between 
" y terms there 



PICKING STONES. 65 

are a thousand things on the farm that have been 
left for the boy to do. Picking up stones in the 
pastures and piling them in heaps used to be one 
of them. Some lots appeared to grow stones, 
or else the sun every year drew them to the 
surface, as it coaxes the round cantelopes out 
of the soft garden soil ; it is certain that there 
were fields that always gave the boys this sort 
of fall work. And very lively work it was on 
frosty mornings for the barefooted boys, who 
were continually turning up the larger stones 
in order to stand for a moment in the warm 
place that had been covered from the frost. 
A boy can stand on one leg as well as a Hol- 
land stork ; and the boy who found a warm 
spot for the sole of his foot was likely to stand 
in it until the words, " Come, stir your stumps," 
broke in discordantly upon his meditations. For 
the boy is very much given to meditations. If 
he had his way he would do nothing in a 



66 BEING A BOY. 

hurry ; he likes to stop and think about things, 
and enjoy his work as he goes along. He 
picks up potatoes as if each one was a lump 
of gold just turned out of the dirt, and requir- 
ing careful examination. 

Although the country boy feels a little joy 
when school breaks up (as he does when any- 
thing breaks up, or any change takes place), 
since he is released from the discipline and 
restraint of it, yet the school is his opening 
into the world, — his romance. Its opportuni- 
ties for enjoyment are numberless. He does 
not exactly know what he is set at books for ; 
he takes spelling rather as an exercise for his 
lungs, standing up and shouting out the words 
with entire recklessness of consequences ; he 
grapples doggedly with 'rithmetic and geogra- 
phy as something that must be cleared out of 
his way before recess, but not at all with the 
zest he would dig a woodchuck out of his hole. 



FUN AT RECESS. 67 

But recess ! Was ever any enjoyment so keen 
as that with which a boy rushes out of the 
school-house door for the ten minutes of recess ? 
He is like to burst with animal spirits ; he runs 
like a deer ; he can nearly fly ; and he throws 
himself into play with entire self-forgetfulness, 
and an energy that would overturn the world 
if his strength were proportioned to it. For 
ten minutes the world is absolutely his ; the 
weights are taken off, restraints are loosed, and 
he is his own master for that brief time, — as 
he never again will be if he lives to be as old 
as the king of Thule, and nobody knows how 
old he was. And there is the nooning, a solid 
hour, in which vast projects can be carried out 
which have been slyly matured during the 
school-hours ; expeditions are undertaken, wars 
are begun between the Indians on one side 
and the settlers on the other, the military com- 
pany is drilled (without uniforms or arms), or 



68 BEING A BOY. 

games are carried on which involve miles of 
running, and an expenditure of wind sufficient 
to spell the spelling-book through at the high- 
est pitch. 

Friendships are formed, too, which are fer- 
vent if not enduring, and enmities contracted 
which are frequently "taken out" on the spot, 
after a rough fashion boys have of settling as 
they go along ; cases of long credit, either in 
words or trade, are not frequent with boys ; 
boot on jack-knives must be paid on the nail ; 
and it is considered much more honorable to 
out with a personal grievance at once, even if 
the explanation is made with the fists, than to 
pretend fair, and then take a sneaking revenge 
on some concealed opportunity. The country 
boy at the district school is introduced into a 
wider world than he knew at home, in many 
ways. Some big boy brings to school a copy 
of the Arabian Nights, a dog-eared copy, with 



THE ARABIAN NIGHTS IN A BARN 69 

cover, title-page, and the last leaves missing, 
which is passed around, and slyly read under 
the desk, and perhaps comes to the little boy 
whose parents disapprove of novel-reading, and 
have no work of fiction in the house except a 
pious fraud called " Six Months in a Convent," 
and the latest comic almanac. The boy's eyes 
dilate as he steals some of the treasures out of 
the wondrous pages, and he longs to lose him- 
self in the land of enchantment open before 
him. He tells at home that he has seen the 
most wonderful book that ever was, and a big 
boy has promised to lend it to him. " Is it a 
true book, John ? " asks the grandmother ; " be- 
cause if it is n't true, it is the worst thing that 
a boy can read." (This happened years ago.) 
John cannot answer as to the truth of the 
book, and so does not bring it home ; but 
he borrows it, nevertheless, and conceals it in 
the barn, and lying in the hay-mow is lost in 



70 



BEING A BOY. 



its enchantments many an odd hour when he 
is supposed to be /M'v/M'ti/// /(„ f/^ ,. ■ 

no chores in ,^jt> 

f//n -sew 



doing chores. 



the Arabian 
Nights ; the boy 
there had but to rub 



the ring and summon 
a genius, who would feed 
the calves and pick up chips 
and bring in wood in a min 
ute. It was through this 
emblazoned portal that 
the boy walked into the 
world of books, which 
he soon found was 
larger than his 
own, and filled gf 
with people he 
longed to know. 




THE FIRST SWEET GIRL. 



71 



And the farmer-boy is not without his sen- 
timent and his secrets, though he has never 
been at a children's party in his life, and, in 
fact, never has heard that children go into so- 




ciety when they are seven, and give regular 
wine-parties when they reach the ripe age of 
nine. But one of his regrets at having the 
summer school close is dimly connected with a 
little girl, whom he does not care much for, — 



J 2 BEING A BOY. 

would a great deal rather play with a boy than 
with her at recess, — but whom he will not see 
again for some time, — a sweet little thing, 
who is very friendly with John, and with whom 
he has been known to exchange bits of candy 
wrapped up in paper, and for whom he cut in 
two his lead-pencil, and gave her half. At the 
last day of school she goes part way with 
John, and then he turns and goes a longer 
distance towards her home, so that it is late 
when he reaches his own. Is he late ? He 
did n't know he was late, he came straight 
home when school was dismissed, only going a 
little way home with Alice Linton to help her 
carry her books. In a box in his chamber, 
which he has lately put a padlock on, among 
fish-hooks and lines and bait-boxes, odd pieces 
of brass, twine, early sweet apples, pop-corn, 
beech-nuts, and other articles of value, are 
some little billets-doux, fancifully folded, three- 



SCHOOL BILLET-DOUX. 73 

cornered or otherwise, and written, I will war- 
rant, in red or beautifully blue ink. These lit- 
tle notes are parting gifts at the close of school, 
and John, no doubt, gave his own in exchange 
for them, though the writing was an immense 
labor, and the folding was a secret bought of 
another boy for a big piece of sweet flag-root 
baked in sugar, a delicacy which John used to 
carry in his pantaloons-pocket until his pocket 
was in such a state that putting his fingers 
into them was about as good as dipping them 
into the sugar-bowl at home. Each precious 
note contained a lock or curl of girl's hair, — 
a rare collection of all colors, after John had 
been in school many terms, and had passed 
through a great many parting scenes, — black, 
brown, red, tow-color, and some that looked 
like spun gold and felt like silk. The senti- 
ment contained in the notes was that which 
was common in the school, and expressed a 



74 BEING A BOY. 

melancholy foreboding of early death, and a 
touching desire to leave hair enough this side 
the grave to constitute a sort of strand of 
remembrance. With little variation, the poetry 
that made the hair precious was in the words, 
and, as a Cockney would say, set to the hair, 
following : — 

' " This lock of hair, 

Which I did wear, 
Was taken from my head ; 

When this you see, 

Remember me, 
Long after I am dead." 

John liked to read these verses, which always 
made a new and fresh impression with each lock 
of hair, and he was not critical ; they were for 
him vehicles of true sentiment, and indeed they 
were what he used when he enclosed a clip of 
his own sandy hair to a friend. And it did 
not occur to him until he was a great deal 
older and less innocent to smile at them. John 
felt that he would sacredly keep every lock of 



HEART TREASURES. 7$ 

hair intrusted to him, though death should 
come on the wings of cholera and take away 
every one of these sad, red-ink correspondents. 
When John's big brother one day caught sight 
of these treasures, and brutally told him that 
he " had hair enough to stuff a horse-collar," 
John was so outraged and shocked, as he should 
have been, at this rude invasion of his heart, 
this coarse suggestion, this profanation of his 
most delicate feeling, that he was only kept 
from crying by the resolution to "lick" his 
brother as soon as ever he got big enough. 




VIII. 

THE COMING OF THANKSGIVING. 




NE of the 
j best things 
2 in farming 

is gather- 
ing the chest- 
nuts, hickory- 
nuts, butternuts, 
and even beech- 
nuts, in the late 
fall, after the frosts 
have cracked the 
husks and the 
high winds have 
shaken them, and 
the colored leaves 



NUTTING. 77 

have strewn the ground. On a bright October 
day, when the air is full of golden sunshine, 
there is nothing quite so exhilarating as going 
nutting. Nor is the pleasure of it altogether 
destroyed for the boy by the consideration that 
he is making himself useful in obtaining sup- 
plies for the winter household. The getting-in 
of potatoes and corn is a different thing ; that 
is the prose, but nutting is the poetry, of farm 
life. I am not sure but the boy would find it 
very irksome, though, if he were obliged to work 
at nut-gathering in order to procure food for 
the family. He is willing to make himself use- 
ful in his own way. The Italian boy, who 
works day after day at a huge pile of pine- 
cones, pounding and cracking them and taking 
out the long seeds, which are sold and eaten 
as we eat nuts (and which are almost as good 
as pumpkin-seeds, another favorite with the 
Italians), probably does not see the fun of nut- 



?8 BEING A BOY, 

ting. Indeed, if the farmer-boy here were set 
at pounding off the walnut-shucks and opening 
the prickly chestnut-burs as a task, he would 
think himself an ill-used boy. What a hard- 
ship the prickles in his fingers would be ! But 
now he digs them out with his jack-knife, and 
enjoys the process on the whole. The boy is 
willing to do any amount of work if it is called 
play. 

In nutting, the squirrel is not more nimble 
and industrious than the boy. I like to see a 
crowd of boys swarm over a chestnut-grove ; 
they leave a desert behind them like the seven- 
teen-years locusts. To climb a tree and shake 
it, to club it, to strip it of its fruit and pass to 
the next, is the sport of a brief time. I have 
seen a legion of boys scamper over our grass- 
plot under the chestnut-trees, each one as ac- 
tive as if he were a new patent picking- 
machine, sweeping the ground clean of nuts, 



THE MARTIAL TURKEY. 79 

and disappear over the hill before I could go 
to the door and speak to them about it. In- 
deed, I have noticed that boys don't care much 
for conversation with the owners of fruit-trees. 
They could speedily make their fortunes if they 
would work as rapidly in cotton-fields. I have 
never seen anything like it except a flock of 
turkeys removing the grasshoppers from a piece 
of pasture. 

Perhaps it is not generally known that we 
get the idea of some of our best military ma- 
noeuvres from the turkey. The deploying of 
the skirmish-line in advance of an army is one 
of them. The drum-major of our holiday militia 
companies is copied exactly from the turkey 
gobbler ; he has the same splendid appearance, 
the same proud step, and the same martial 
aspect. The gobbler does not lead his forces 
in the field, but goes behind them, like the 
colonel of a regiment, so that he can see 



80 BEING A BOY. 

every part of the line and direct its move- 
ments. This resemblance is one of the most 
singular things in natural history. I like to 
watch the gobbler manoeuvring his forces in a 
grasshopper-field. He throws out his company 
of two dozen turkeys in a crescent-shaped skir- 
mish-line, the number disposed at equal dis- 
tances, while he walks majestically in the rear. 
They advance rapidly, picking right and left, 
with military precision, killing the foe and dis- 
posing of the dead bodies with the same peck. 
Nobody has yet discovered how many grass- 
hoppers a turkey will hold ; but he is very 
much like a boy at a Thanksgiving dinner, — 
he keeps on eating as long as the supplies 
last. The gobbler, in one of these raids, does 
not condescend to grab a single grasshopper, 
— at least, not while anybody is watching him. 
But I suppose he makes up for it when his 
dignity cannot be injured by having spectators 



THE AWFUL FESTIVAL. 8* 

of his voracity ; perhaps he falls upon the 
grasshoppers when they are driven into a cor- 
ner of the field. But he is only fattening him- 
self for destruction ; like all greedy persons, he 
comes to a bad end. And if the turkeys had 
any Sunday school, they would be taught this. 
The New England boy used to look forward 
to Thanksgiving as the great event of the year. 
He was apt to get stents set him, — so much 
corn to husk, for instance, before that day, so 
that he could have an extra play-spell ; and in 
order to gain a day or two, he would work at 
his task with the rapidity of half a dozen boys. 
He had the day after Thanksgiving always as 
a holiday, and this was the day he counted 
on. Thanksgiving itself was rather an awful 
festival, — very much like Sunday, except for 
the enormous dinner, which filled his imagina- 
tion for months before as completely as it did 
his stomach for that day and a week after. 



82 



BEING A BOY. 




There was an impression in the house that that 
dinner was the 
most important 
event since the 
landing from the 
Mayflower. Heliogabalus, who 
did not resemble a Pilgrim 
Father at all, but who had 
prepared for himself in his 
day some very sumptuous ban- 
quets in Rome, and ate a 
great deal of the best he could 
get (and liked peacocks stuffed 
with asafcetida, for one thing), 
never had any- 



TWENTY-FOUR KINDS OF PIE. 83 

a Thanksgiving dinner ; for do you suppose that 
he, or Sardanapalus either, ever had twenty-four 
different kinds of pie at one dinner ? Therein 
many a New England boy is greater than the 
Roman emperor or the Assyrian king, and these 
were among the most luxurious eaters of their 
day and generation. But something more is ne- 
cessary to make good men than plenty to eat, 
as Heliogabalus no doubt found when his head 
was cut off. Cutting off the head was a mode 
the people had of expressing disapproval of 
their conspicuous men. Nowadays they elect 
them to a higher office, or give them a mission 
to some foreign country, if they do not do well 
where they are. 

For days and days before Thanksgiving the 
boy was kept at work evenings, pounding and 
paring and cutting up and mixing (not being 
allowed to taste much), until the world seemed 
to him to be made of fragrant spices, green 



84 BEING A BOY. 

fruit, raisins, and pastry, — a world that he was 
only yet allowed to enjoy through his nose. 
How filled the house was with the most deli- 
cious smells ! The mince-pies that were made ! 
If John had been shut in solid walls with them 
piled about him, he could n't have eaten his 
way out in four weeks. There were dainties 
enough cooked in those two weeks to have 
made the entire year luscious with good living, 
if they had been scattered along in it. But 
people were probably all the better for scrimp- 
ing themselves a little in order to make this a 
great feast. And it was not by any means 
over in a day. There were weeks deep of 
chicken-pie and other pastry. The cold but- 
tery was a cave of Aladdin, and it took a long 
time to excavate all its riches. 

Thanksgiving Day itself was a heavy day, 
the hilarity of it being so subdued by going to 
meeting, and the universal wearing of the Sun- 



NO HILARITY. 85 

day clothes, that the boy could n't see it. But 
if he felt little exhilaration, he ate a great deal. 
The next day was the real holiday. Then were 
the merry-making parties, and perhaps the skat- 
ings and sleighrides, for the freezing weather 
came before the governor's proclamation in 
many parts of New England. The night after 
Thanksgiving occurred, perhaps, the first real 
party that the boy had ever attended, with 
live girls in it, dressed so bewitchingly. And 
there he heard those philandering songs, and 
played those sweet games of forfeits, which put 
him quite beside himself, and kept him awake 
that night till the rooster crowed at the end 
of his first chicken-nap. What a new world 
did that party open to him ! I think it likely 
that he saw there, and probably did not dare 
say ten words to, some tall, graceful girl, much 
older than himself, who seemed to him like a 
new order of being. He could see her face 



86 



BEING A BOY. 



just as plainly in the darkness of his chamber. 
He wondered if she noticed how awkward he 
was, and how short his trousers-legs were. 
He blushed as 
he thought of 
his rather ill- 
fitting shoes; 
and determined, 
then and there, 
that he wouldn't 




be put off with a 
ribbon any longer, but would have a young 
man's necktie. It was somewhat painful think- 
ing the party over, but it was delicious too. 



ALL FOR LOVE. 



S7 



He did not think, probably, that he would die 
for that tall, handsome girl ; he did not put 
it exactly in that way. But he rather resolved 
to live for her, — which might in the end 
amount to the same thing. At least, he 
thought that nobody would live to speak twice 
disrespectfully of her in his presence. 




IX. 



THE SEASON OF PUMPKIN-PIE. 




HAT John said 
was, that he 
did n't care 
much for pump- 
kin-pie ; but that was 
after he had eaten a 
whole one. It seemed 
to him then that mince 
would be better. 

The feeling of a boy 
towards pumpkin - pie 
has never been properly considered. There is 
an air of festivity about its approach in the fall. 
The boy is willing to help pare and cut up the 



THE BOY IN THE BUTTERY. 89 

pumpkin, and he watches with the greatest inter- 
est the stirring-up process and the pouring into 
the scalloped crust. When the sweet savor of 
the baking reaches his nostrils, he is filled with 
the most delightful anticipations. Why should 
he not be ? He knows that for months to come 
the buttery will contain golden treasures, and 
that it will require only a slight ingenuity to get 
at them. 

The fact is, that the boy is as good in the 
buttery as in any part of farming. His elders 
say that the boy is always hungry ; but that is a 
very coarse way to put it. He has only recently 
come into a world that is full of good things to 
eat, and there is on the whole a very short time 
in which to eat them ; at least he is told, among 
the first information he receives, that life is 
short. Life being brief, and pie and the like 
fleeting, he very soon decides upon an active 
campaign. It may be an old story to people who 



go 



BEING A BOY. 



have been eating for forty or fifty years, but it is 
different with a beginner. He takes the thick 
and thin as it comes, as to pie, for instance. 
Some people do make them very thin. I knew 
a place where they were not thicker than the poor 
man's plaster ; they were spread so thin upon 
the crust that they were better fitted to draw out 
hanger than to satisfy it. They used to be made 
up by the great oven-full and kept in the dry 
cellar, where they hardened and dried to a 
toughness you would hardly believe. This was 
a long time ago, and they make the pumpkin-pie 
in the country better now, or the race of boys 
would have been so discouraged that I think 
they would have stopped coming into the world. 
The truth is that boys have always been so 
plenty that they are not half appreciated. We 
have shown that a farm could not get along with- 
out them, and yet their rights are seldom rec- 
ognized. One of the most amusing things is 



THE BOY'S CALVES. 



91 



their effort to acquire personal property. The 
boy has the care of the calves ; they always need 
feeding or shutting up or letting out ; when the 
boy wants to play there are those calves to be 
looked after, — until he gets to hate the name of 
calf. But in consideration of his faithfulness, 
two of them are given to him. There is no 
doubt that they are his, he has the entire charge 
of them. When they get to be steers, he spends 
all his holidays in breaking them in to a yoke. 
He gets them so broken in that they will run 
like a pair of deer all over the farm, turning the 
yoke, and kicking their heels/while he follows in 
full chase, shouting the ox language till he is red 
in the face. When the steers grow up to be 
cattle, a drover one day comes along and takes 
them away, and the boy is told that he can have 
another pair of calves ; and so, with undimin- 
ished faith he goes back and begins over again 
to make his fortune. He owns lambs and young 



92 BEING A BOY. 

colts in the same way and makes just as much 
out of them. 

There are ways in which the farmer-boy can 
earn money, as by gathering the early chestnuts 
and taking them to the Corner store, or by 
finding turkeys' eggs and selling them to his 
mother ; and another way is to go without but- 
ter at the table — but the money thus made is 
for the heathen. John read in Dr. Livingstone 
that some of the tribes in Central Africa (which 
is represented by a blank spot in the atlas), use 
the butter to grease their hair, putting on pounds 
of it at a time ; and he said he had rather eat his 
butter than have it put to that use, especially as 
it melted away so fast in that hot climate. 

Of course it was explained to John that the 
missionaries do not actually carry butter to 
Africa, and that they must usually go without 
it themselves there, it being almost impossible 
to make it good from the milk in the cocoanuts. 



MISSIONARY EFFORTS. 93 

And it was further explained to him that even 
if the heathen never received his butter or the 
money for it, it was an excellent thing for a boy 
to cultivate the habit of self-denial and of benev- 
olence, and if the heathen never heard of him, 
he would be blessed for his generosity. This 
was all true. 

But John said that he was tired of supporting 
the heathen out of his butter, and he wished the 
rest of the family would also stop eating butter 
and save the money for missions ; and he wanted 
to know where the other members of the family 
got their money to send to the heathen ; and his 
mother said that he was about half right, and 
that self-denial was just as good for grown peo- 
ple as it was for little boys and girls. 

The boy is not always slow to take what he 
considers his rights. Speaking of those thin 
pumpkin-pies kept in the cellar cupboard. I 
used to know a boy, who afterwards grew to be 



94 



BEING A BOY. 



a selectman, and brushed his hair straight up 
like General Jackson, and went to the legislature, 
where he always voted against every measure 
that was proposed, in the most honest manner, 
and got the reputation of being the " watch-dog 
of the treasury." Rats in the cellar were noth- 
ing to be compared to this boy for destructive- 
ness in pies. He used to go down whenever 
he could make an excuse, to get apples for the 
family, or draw a mug of cider for his dear old 
grandfather (who was a 
famous story-teller about 
the Revolutionary War, 
and would no doubt have 
been wounded in battle if 
he had not been as pru- 
dent as he was patriotic), 
and come up stairs with a 
tallow candle in one hand 
and the apples or cider in the other, looking as 




CONCEDED PIE. 95 

innocent and as unconscious as if he had never 
done anything in his life except deny himself 
butter for the sake of the heathen. And yet 
this boy would have buttoned under his jacket 
an entire round pumpkin-pie. And the pie was 
so well made and so dry that it was not injured 
in the least, and it never hurt the boy's clothes 
a bit more than if it had been inside of him 
instead of outside ; and this boy would retire 
to a secluded place and eat it with another boy, 
being never suspected because he was not in 
the cellar long enough to eat a pie, and he never 
appeared to have one about him. But he did 
something worse than this. When his mother 
saw that pie after pie departed, she told the 
family that she suspected the hired man ; and the 
boy never said a word, which was the meanest 
kind of lying. That hired man was probably 
regarded with suspicion by the family to the 
end of his days, and if he had been accused of 
robbing, they would have believed him guilty. 



96 BEING A BOY. 

I should n't wonder if that selectman occasion- 
ally has remorse now about that pie ; dreams, 
perhaps, that it is buttoned up under his jacket 
and sticking to him like a breastplate ; that it 
lies upon his stomach like a round and red-hot 
nightmare, eating into his vitals. Perhaps not. 
It is difficult to say exactly what was the sin of 
stealing that kind of pie, especially if the one 
who stole it ate it It could have been used 
for the game of pitching quoits, and a pair of 
them would have made very fair wheels for the 
dog-cart. And yet it is probably as wrong to 
steal a thin pie as a thick one ; and it made no 
difference because it was easy to steal this sort. 
Easy stealing is no better than easy lying, where 
detection of the lie is difficult. The boy who 
steals his mother's pies has no right to be sur- 
prised when some other boy steals his water- 
melons. Stealing is like charity in one respect, 
— it is apt to begin at home. 



X. 



FIRST EXPERIENCE OF THE WORLD. 




p ^ 

F I were forced 

to be a boy, 

and a boy in 

the country, 

— the best 

kind of boy 

to be in the 

summer, — 

I would be 

about ten 

years of age. 

As soon as 

I got any 

older, I would quit it. The trouble with a 



98 BEING A BOY. 

boy is that just as he begins to enjoy himself 
he is too old, and has to be set to doing some- 
thing else. If a country boy were wise he 
would stay at just that age when he could 
enjoy himself most, and have the least expected 
of him in the way of work. 

Of course the perfectly good boy will always 
prefer to work and to do " chores " for his father 
and errands for his mother and sisters, rather 
than enjoy himself in his own way. I never 
saw but one such boy. He lived in the town 
of Goshen, — not the place where the butter is 
made, but a much better Goshen than that. 
And I never saw him, but I heard of him ; and 
being about the same age, as I supposed, I was 
taken once from Zoah, where I lived, to Goshen 
to see him. But he was dead. He had been 
dead almost a year, so that it was impossible to 
see him. He died of the most singular disease : 
it was from not eating green apples in the season 



THE GOOD BOY. 



99 



of them. This boy, whose name was Solomon, 
before he died, would rather split up kindling- 
wood for his mother than go a-fishing, — the 
consequence was that he was kept at splitting 
kindling-wood and such work most of the time, 
and grew a better and more useful boy day by 
day. Solomon would not disobey his parents 
and eat green apples, — not even when they 
were ripe enough to knock off with a stick, — 
but he had such a longing for them, that he 
pined, and passed away. If he had eaten the 
green apples he would have died of them, prob- 
ably ; so that his example is a difficult one to 
follow. In fact, a boy is a hard subject to get a 
moral from. All his little playmates who ate 
green apples came to Solomon's funeral, and 
were very sorry for what they had done. 

'John was a very different boy from Solomon, 
not half so good, nor half so dead. He was a 
farmer's boy, as Solomon was, but he did not 



IOO BEING A BOY. 

take so much interest in the farm. If John 
could have had his way he would have dis- 
covered a cave full of diamonds, and lots of 
nail-kegs full of gold-pieces and Spanish dollars, 
with a pretty little girl living in the cave, and 
two beautifully caparisoned horses, upon which, 
taking the jewels and money, they would have 
ridden off together, he did not know where. 
John had got thus far in his studies, which were 
apparently arithmetic and geography, but were 
in reality the Arabian Nights, and other 
books of high and mighty adventure. He was 
a simple country boy, and did not know much 
about the world as it is, but he had one of his 
own imagination, in which he lived a good deal. 
I dare say he found out soon enough what the 
world is, and he had a lesson or two when he 
was quite young, in two incidents, which I may 
as well relate. 

If you had seen John at this time you might 



A NEAT HAT. 



IOI 



have thought he was only a shabbily dressed 
country lad, and you never would have guessed 

what beautiful 
thoughts he 
sometimes had 
as he went stub- 
bing his toes 
along the dusty 
road, nor what 
a chivalrous lit- 
tle fellow he was. 
You would have 
seen a short boy, 
barefooted, with 
trousers at once 
^yQ*^ too big and too 

short, held up perhaps by one suspender only, 
a checked cotton shirt, and a hat of braided 
palmleaf, frayed at the edges and bulged up in 
the crown. It is impossible to keep a hat neat 




102 BEING A BOY, 

if you use it to catch bumble-bees and whisk 
'em ; to bail the water from a leaky boat ; to 
catch minnows in ; to put over honey-bees' nests, 
and to transport pebbles, strawberries, and hens' 
e gg s - John usually carried a sling in his hand, 
or a bow, or a limber stick, sharp at one end, 
from which he could sling apples a great dis- 
tance. If he walked in the road, he walked in 
the middle of it, shuffling up the dust ; or if he 
went elsewhere, he was likely to be running 
on the top of the fence or the stone-wall, and 
chasing chipmunks. 

John knew the best place to dig sweet-flag in 
all the farm ; it was in a meadow by the river, 
where the bobolinks sang so gayly. He never 
liked to hear the bobolink sing, however, for he 
said it always reminded him of the whetting of 
a scythe, and that reminded him of spreading 
hay ; and if there was anything he hated it was 
spreading hay after the mowers. " I guess you 



A BEAUTIFUL LADY. 103 

would n't like it yourself," said John, " with the 
stubbs getting into your feet, and the hot sun, 
and the men getting ahead of you, all you could 
do." 

Towards evening, once, John was coming 
along the road home with some stalks of the 
sweet-flag in his hand ; there is a succulent pith 
in the end of the stalk which is very good to eat, 
tender, and not so strong as the root ; and John 
liked to pull it, and carry home what he did not 
eat on the way. As he was walking along he 
met a carriage, which stopped opposite to him ; 
he also stopped and bowed, as country boys used 
to bow in John's day. A lady leaned from the 
carriage, and said, — 

" What have you got, little boy ? " 
She seemed to be the most beautiful woman 
John had ever seen ; with light hair, dark, ten- 
der eyes, and the sweetest smile. There was 
that in her gracious mien and in her dress which 



104 BEING A BOY. 

reminded John of the beautiful castle ladies, with 
whom he was well acquainted in books. He 
felt that he knew her at once, and he also 
seemed to be a sort of young prince himself. 
I fancy he did n't look much like one. But of 
his own appearance he thought not at all, as he 
replied to the lady's question, without the least 
embarrassment, — 

" It's sweet-flag stalk ; would you like some ? " 

" Indeed, I should like to taste it," said the 
lady, with a most winning smile. " I used to 
be very fond of it when I was a little girl." 

John was delighted that the Jady should like 
sweet-flag, and that she was pleased to accept 
it from him. He thought himself that it was 
about the best thing to eat he knew. He 
handed up a large bunch of it. The lady took 
two or three stalks, and was about to return 
the rest, when John said, — 

" Please keep it all, ma'am. I can get lots 
more. I know where it 's ever so thick." 



JOHN HUMILIATED. 105 

" Thank you, thank you," said the lady ; and 
as the carriage started she reached out her hand 
to John. He did not understand the motion, 
until he saw a cent drop in the road at his feet. 
Instantly all his illusion and his pleasure van- 
ished. Something like tears were in his eyes as 
he shouted, — 

" I don't want your cent. I don't sell flag ! " 

John was intensely mortified. " I suppose," 
he said, "she thought I was a sort of beggar- 
boy. To think of selling flag ! " 

At any rate, he walked away and left the cent 
in the road, a humiliated boy. The next day he 
told Jim Gates about it. Jim said he was green 
not to take the money ; he 'd go and look for it 
now, if he would tell him about where it dropped. 
And Jim did spend an hour poking about in the 
dirt, but he did not find the cent. Jim, however, 
had an idea ; he said he was going to dig sweet- 
flag, and see if another carriage would n't come 
along. 



io6 



BEING A BOY. 



John's next rebuff and knowledge of the world 
was of another sort. He was again walking the 




road at twilight, when he was overtaken by a 



A CRUEL THING. lOJ 

wagon with one seat, upon which were two 
pretty girls, and a young gentleman sat between 
them, driving. It was a merry party, and John 
could hear them laughing and singing as they 
approached him. The wagon stopped when it 
overtook him, and one of the sweet-faced girls 
leaned from the seat and said, quite seriously 
and pleasantly, — 

" Little boy, how 's your mar ? " 

John was surprised and puzzled for a moment. 
He had never seen the young lady, but he 
thought that she perhaps knew his mother ; at 
any rate his instinct of politeness made him 
say, — 

" She 's pretty well, I thank you." 

" Does she know you are out ? " 

And thereupon all three in the wagon burst 
into a roar of laughter, and dashed on. 

It flashed upon John in a moment that he had 
been imposed on, and it hurt him dreadfully. 



108 BEING A BOY. 

His self-respect was injured somehow, and he 
felt as if his lovely, gentle mother had been 
insulted. He would like to have thrown a stone 
at the wagon, and in a rage he cried, — 

" You 're a nice — " but he could n't think 
of any hard, bitter words quick enough. 

Probably the young lady, who might have 
been almost any young lady, never knew what 
a cruel thing she had done. 






§§S|p»: 


mm$M oc \ 



XI 



HOME INVENTIONS. 




H E winter 
season is not 
all sliding 
down hill for 
the farmer -boy, by any 
means ; yet he contrives to 
get as much fun out of it 
as from, any part of the 
year. There is a dif- 
ference in boys, some 
g-_ are always jolly 
an d s ome go 
scowling always 



IIO BEING A BOY. 

through life as if they had a stone-bruise on 
each heel. I like a jolly boy. 

I used to know one who came round every 
morning to sell molasses candy, offering two 
sticks for a cent apiece ; it was worth fifty cents 
a day to see his cheery face. That boy rose in 
the world. He is now the owner of a large 
town at the West. To be sure, there are no 
houses in it except his own ; but there is a map 
of it and roads and streets are laid out on it, with 
dwellings and churches and academies and a 
college and an opera-house, and you could 
scarcely tell it from Springfield or Hartford, on 
paper. He and all his family have the fever 
and ague, and shake worse than the people at 
Lebanon ; but they do not mind it, it makes 
them lively, in fact. Ed May is just as jolly as 
he used to be. He calls his town Mayopolis, 
and expects to be mayor of it ; his wife, how- 
ever, calls the town Maybe. 



THE COLD BARN. Ill 

The farmer-boy likes to have winter come for 
one thing, because it freezes up the ground so 
that he can't dig in it ; and it is covered with 
snow so that there is no picking up stones, nor 
driving the cows to pasture. He would have a 
very easy time if it were not for the getting up 
before daylight to build the fires and do the 
" chores." Nature intended the long winter 
nights for the farmer-boy to sleep ; but in my 
day he was expected to open his sleepy eyes 
when the cock crew, get out of the warm bed 
and light a candle, struggle into his cold pan- 
taloons, and pull on boots in which the ther- 
mometer would have gone down to zero, rake 
open the coals on the hearth and start the 
morning fire, and then go to the barn to " fod- 
der." The frost was thick on the kitchen win- 
dows, the snow was drifted against the door, 
and the journey to the barn, in the pale light 
of dawn, over the creaking snow, was like an 



112 BEING A BOY. 

exile's trip to Siberia. The boy was not half 
awake when he stumbled into the cold barn, 
and was greeted by the lowing and bleating and 
neighing of cattle waiting for their breakfast. 
How their breath steamed up from the mangers, 
and hung in frosty spears from their noses. 
Through the great lofts above the hay, where 
the swallows nested, the winter wind whistled, 
and the snow sifted. Those old barns were well 
ventilated. 

I used to spend much valuable time in plan- 
ning a barn that should be tight and warm, 
with a fire in it if necessary in order to keep 
the temperature somewhere near the freezing- 
point. I could n't see how the cattle could live 
in a place where a lively boy, full of young 
blood, would freeze to death in a short time if 
he did not swing his arms and slap his hands, 
and jump about like a goat. I thought I would 
have a sort of perpetual manger that should 



FIRE-BUILDING MACHINE. 1 13 

shake down the hay when it was wanted, and 
a self-acting machine that should cut up the 
turnips and pass them into the mangers, and 
water always flowing for the cattle and horses 
to drink. With these simple arrangements I 
could lie in bed, and know that the " chores " 
were doing themselves. It would also be neces- 
sary, in order that I should not be disturbed, 
that the crow should be taken out of the 
roosters, but I could think of no process to do 
it. It seems to me that the hen-breeders, if 
they know as much as they say they do, might 
raise a breed of crowless roosters, for the ben- 
efit of boys, quiet neighborhoods, and sleepy 
families. 

There was another notion that I had about 
kindling the kitchen fire, that I never carried 
out. It was to have a spring at the head of 
my bed, connecting with a wire, which should 
run to a torpedo which I would plant over night 



ii4 



BEING A BOY. 



in the ashes of the fire- 
place. By touching the 



spring I could explode the : 




torpedo, which would scat- 
ter the ashes and cover ' V 'V \ r f~Jtf utf% If 1 
the live coals, and at the /l 

same time shake down the sticks of wood 
which were standing by the side of the ashes 
in the chimney, and the fire would kindle itself. 

This ingenious plan 
was frowned on by 
the whole family, 
who said they did 
not want to be 
waked up every 
morning by an ex- 
plosion. And yet 
they expected me 
to wake up without 
an explosion. A 




SLIDING DOWN HILL. 115 

boy's plans for making life agreeable are hardly 
ever heeded. 

I never knew a boy farmer who was not 
eager to go to the district school in the winter. 
There is such a chance for learning, that he 
must be a dull boy who does . not come out in 
the spring a fair skater, an accurate snowballer, 
and an accomplished slider-down-hill, with or 
without a board, on his seat, on his stomach, 
or on his feet. Take a moderate hill, with a 
foot-slide down it worn to icy smoothness, and 
a " go-round " of boys on it, and there is noth- 
ing like it for whittling away boot-leather. The 
boy is the shoemaker's friend. An active lad 
can wear down a pair of cowhide soles in a 
week so that the ice will scrape his toes. Sled- 
ding or coasting is also slow fun compared to 
the " bareback " sliding down a steep hill over a 
hard, glistening crust. It is not only danger- 
ous, but it is destructive to jacket and panta- 



Il6 BEING A BOY. 

loons to a degree to make a tailor laugh. If 
any other animal wore out his skin as fast as 
a school-boy wears out his clothes in winter, it 
would need a new one once a month. In a 
country district-school patches were not by any 
means a sign of poverty, but of the boy's courage 
and adventurous disposition. Our elders used to 
threaten to dress us in leather and put sheet- 
iron seats in our trousers. The boy said that 
he wore out his trousers on the hard seats in 
the school-house ciphering hard sums. For that 
extraordinary statement he received two cas- 
tigations, one at home, that was mild, and one 
from the schoolmaster, who was careful to lay 
the rod upon the boy's sliding-place, punish- 
ing him as he jocosely called it on a sliding 
scale, according to the thinness of his panta- 
loons. 

What I liked best at school, however, was 
the study of history, early history, the Indian 



OBJECT-LESSONS. 1 1 / 

wars. We studied it mostly at noontime, and 
we had it illustrated as the children nowadays 
have " object-lessons," — though our object was 
not so much to have lessons as it was to revive 
real history. 

Back of the school-house rose a round hill, 
upon which tradition said had stood in colonial 
times a block-house, built by the settlers for 
defence against the Indians. For the Indians 
had the idea that the whites were not settled 
enough, and used to come nights to settle them 
with a tomahawk. It was called Fort Hill. It 
was very steep on each side, and the river ran 
close by. It was a charming place in summer, 
where one could find laurel, and checkerber- 
ries, and sassafras roots, and sit in the cool 
breeze, looking at the mountains across the 
river, and listening to the murmur of the Deer- 
field. The Methodists built a meeting-house 
there afterwards, but the hill was so slippery in 



n8 



BEING A BOY. 



winter that the aged could not climb it, and 
the wind raged so fiercely that it blew nearly 
all the young Methodists away (many of whom 
were afterwards heard of in the West), and 




finally the meeting-house itself came down into 
the valley, and grew a steeple, and enjoyed 
itself ever afterwards. It used to be a notion 



PEQUOTS AND EARLY SETTLERS. 1 19 

in New England that a meeting-house ought to 
stand as near heaven as possible. 

The boys at our school divided themselves 
into two parties ; one was the Early Settlers 
and the other the Pequots, the latter the most 
numerous. The Early Settlers built a snow fort 
on the hill, and a strong fortress it was, con- 
structed of snowballs, rolled up to a vast size 
(larger than the Cyclopian blocks of stone which 
form the ancient Etruscan walls in Italy), piled 
one upon another, and the whole cemented by 
pouring on water which froze and made the 
walls solid. The Pequots helped the whites 
build it. It had a covered way under the snow, 
through which only could it be entered, and it 
had bastions and towers and openings to fire 
from, and a great many other things for which 
there are no names in military books. And it 
had a glacis and a ditch outside. 

When it was completed, the Early Settlers, 



120 BEING A BOY. 

leaving the women in the school-house, a prey 
to the Indians, used to retire into it, and await 
the attack of the Pequots. There was only a 
handful of the garrison, while the Indians were 
many, and also barbarous. It was agreed that 
they should be barbarous. And it was in this 
light that the great question was settled whether 
a boy might snowball with balls that he had 
soaked over night in water and let freeze. 
They were as hard as cobble-stones, and if a 
boy should be hit in the head by one of them 
he could not tell whether he was a Pequot or 
an Early Settler. It was considered as unfair 
to use these ice-balls in an open fight, as it is 
to use poisoned ammunition in real war. But 
as the whites were protected by the fort, and 
the Indians were treacherous by nature, it was 
decided that the latter might use the hard 
missiles. 

The Pequots used to come swarming up the 



THE FIGHT. 121 

hill, with hideous war-whoops, attacking the fort 
on all sides with great noise and a shower of 
balls. The garrison replied with yells of de- 
fiance and well-directed shots, hurling back the 
invaders when they attempted to scale the walls. 
The Settlers had the advantage of position, but 
they were sometimes overpowered by numbers, 
and would often have had to surrender but for 
the ringing of the school-bell. The Pequots 
were in great fear of the school-bell. 

I do not remember that the whites ever 
hauled down their flag and surrendered volun- 
tarily ; but once or twice the fort was carried 
by storm and the garrison were massacred to a 
boy, and thrown out of the fortress, having been 
first scalped. To take a boy's cap was to scalp 
him, and after that he was dead, if he played 
fair. There were a great many hard hits given 
and taken, but always cheerfully, for it was in 
the cause of our early history. The history of 



122 BEING A BOY. 

Greece and Rome was stuff compared to this. 
And we had many boys in our school who 
could imitate the Indian war-whoop enough 
better than they could scan anna, virumque 
cano. 




XII. 

THE LONELY FARM-HOUSE. 

HE winter 
evenings of 
the farmer- 
I v boy in New- 
England used 
to be so gay as 
to tire him of the pleas- 
ures of life before he be- 
came of age. A remote 
farm-house, standing a little off the road, banked 
up with sawdust and earth to keep the frost 
out of the cellar, blockaded with snow, and 
flying a blue flag of smoke from its chimney, 
looks like a besieged fort. On cold and stormy 




124 BEING A BOY. 

winter nights, to the traveller wearily dragging 
along in his creaking sleigh, the light from its 
windows suggests a house of refuge and the 
cheer of a blazing fire. But it is no less a fort, 
into which the family retire when the New Eng- 
land winter on the hills really sets in. 

The boy is an important part of the garri- 
son. He is not only one of the best means of 
communicating with the outer world, but he 
furnishes half the entertainment and takes two 
thirds of the scolding of the family circle. A 
farm would come to grief without a boy on it, 
but it is impossible to think of a farm-house 
without a boy in it. 

"That boy" brings life into the house; his 
tracks are to be seen everywhere, he leaves all 
the doors open, he has n't half filled the wood- 
box, he makes noise enough to wake the dead ; 
or he is in a brown-study by the fire and can- 
not be stirred, or he has fastened a grip into 



"THAT BOY:' 125 

some Crusoe book which cannot easily be sha- 
ken off. I suppose that the farmer-boy's even- 
ings are not now what they used to be ; that 
he has more books, and less to do, and is not 
half so good a boy as formerly, when he used 
to think the almanac was pretty lively reading, 
and the comic almanac, if he could get hold of 
that, was a supreme delight. 

Of course he had the evenings to himself, 
after he had done the " chores " at the barn, 
brought in the wood and piled it high in the 
box, ready to be heaped upon the great open 
fire. It was nearly dark when he came from 
school (with its continuation of snowballing 
and sliding), and he always had an agreeable 
time stumbling and fumbling around in barn 
and wood-house, in the waning light. 

John used to say that he supposed nobody 
would do his " chores " if he did not get home 
till midnight ; and he was never contradicted. 



126 BEING A BOY. 

Whatever happened to him, and whatever length 
of days or sort of weather was produced by the 
almanac, the cardinal rule was that he should 
be at home before dark. 

John used to imagine what people did in 
the dark ages, and wonder sometimes whether 
he was n't still in them. 

Of course, John had nothing to do all the 
evening, after his "chores," — except little things. 
While he drew his chair up to the table in 
order to get the full radiance of the tallow 
candle on his slate or his book, the women of 
the house also sat by the table knitting and 
sewing. The head of the house sat in his 
chair, tipped back against the chimney ; the 
hired man was in danger of burning his boots 
in the fire. John might be deep in the excite- 
ment of a bear story, or be hard at writing a 
" composition " on his greasy slate ; but what- 
ever he was doing, he was the only one who 



AN IDLE EVENING. 12? 

could always be interrupted. It was he who 
must snuff the candles, and put on a stick of 
wood, and toast the cheese, and turn the ap- 
ples, and crack the nuts. He knew where 
the fox-and-geese board was, and he could find 
the twelve-men-Morris. Considering that he 
was expected to go to bed at eight o'clock, one 
would say that the opportunity for study was 
not great, and that his reading was rather in- 
terrupted. There seemed to be always some- 
thing for him to do, even when all the rest of 
the family came as near being idle as is ever 
possible in a New England household. 

No wonder that John was not sleepy at eight 
o'clock ; he had been flying about while the 
others had been yawning before the fire. He 
would like to sit up just to see how much more 
solemn and stupid it would become as the night 
went on ; he wanted to tinker his skates, to 
mend his sled, to finish that chapter. Why 



128 



BEING A BOY. 



should he go away from that bright blaze, and 
the company that sat in its radiance, to the 
cold and solitude of his chamber ? Why did n't 
the people who were sleepy go to bed ? 

How lone- 
some the old 
house was ; how 
cold it was, away 
from that great 
central fire in 
the heart of it ; 
how its timbers 
creaked as if in 
the contracting 
pinch of the 
frost ; what a 
rattling there 
was of windows, 
what a concerted 
attack upon the clapboards ; how the floors 




THE HOUSE AT NIGHT 1 29 

squeaked, and what gusts from round corners 
came to snatch the feeble flame of the candle 
from the boy's hand. How he shivered, as he 
paused at the staircase window to look out up- 
on the great fields of snow, upon the stripped 
forest, through which he could hear the wind 
raving in a kind of fury, and up at the black 
flying clouds, amid which the young moon was 
dashing and driven on like a frail shallop at 
sea. And his teeth chattered more than ever 
when he got into the icy sheets, and drew him- 
self up into a ball in his flannel nightgown, 
like a fox in his hole. 

For a little time he could hear the noises 
down stairs, and an occasional laugh ; he could 
guess that now they were having cider, and 
now apples were going round ; and he could 
feel the wind tugging at the house, even some- 
times shaking the bed. But this did not last 
long. He soon went away into a country he 



130 BEING A BOY. 

always delighted to be in ; a calm place where 
the wind never blew, and no one dictated the 
time of going to bed to any one else. I like 
to think of him sleeping there, in such rude 
surroundings, ingenious, innocent, mischievous, 
with no thought of the buffeting he is to get 
from a world that has a good many worse places 
for a boy than the hearth of an old farm-house, 
and the sweet, though undemonstrative, affec- 
tion of its family life. 

But there were other evenings in the boy's 
life, that were different from these at home, 
and one of them he will never forget. It 
opened a new world to John, and set him into 
a great flutter. It produced a revolution in his 
mind in regard to neckties ; it made him won- 
der if greased boots were quite the thing com- 
pared with blacked boots; and he wished he 
had a long looking-glass, so that he could see, 
as he walked away from it, what was the effect 



A REVOLUTION IN LIFE. 13 1 

of round patches on the portion of his trousers 
he could not see, except in a mirror ; and if 
patches were quite stylish, even on every-day 
trousers. And he began to be very much troub- 
led about the parting of his hair, and how to 
find out on which side was the natural part. 

The evening to which I refer was that of 
John's first party. He knew the girls at school, 
and he was interested in some of them with a 
different interest from that he took in the boys. 
He never wanted to " take it out " with one 
of them, for an insult, in a stand-up fight, and 
he instinctively softened a boy's natural rude- 
ness when he was with them. He would help 
a timid little girl to stand erect and slide ; he 
would draw her on his sled, till his hands were 
stiff with cold, without a murmur ; he would 
generously give her red apples into which he 
longed to set his own sharp teeth ; and he 
would cut in two his lead-pencil for a girl, when 



132 BEING A BOY. 

he would not for a boy. Had he not some of 
the beautiful auburn tresses of Cynthia Rudd 
in his skate, spruce-gum, and wintergreen box 
at home ? And yet the grand sentiment of life 
was little awakened in John. He liked best to 
be with boys, and their rough play suited him 
better than the amusements of the shrinking, 
fluttering, timid, and sensitive little girls. John 
had not learned then that a spider-web is 
stronger than a cable ; or that a pretty little 
girl could turn him round her finger a great 
deal easier than a big bully of a boy could 
make him cry " enough." 

John had indeed been at spelling-schools, 
and had accomplished the feat of "going home 
with a girl " afterwards ; and he had been grow- 
ing into the habit of looking around in meeting 
on Sunday, and noticing how Cynthia was 
dressed, and not enjoying the service quite as 
much if Cynthia was absent as when she was 



THE ADVENT OF SENTIMENT. 



133 



present. But there was very little sentiment 
in all this, and nothing whatever to make John 
blush at hearing her name. 

But now 
John was 
invited to a 
regular par- 
ty. There 
was the in- 
vitation, in 
a three-cor- 
nered billet, 
sealed with 

a transparent wafer : " Miss C. Rudd requests 
the pleasure of the company of," etc., all in blue 
ink, and the finest kind of pin-scratching writ- 
ing. What a precious document it was to John ! 
It even exhaled a faint sort of perfume, whether 
of lavender or caraway-seed he could not tell. 
He read it over a hundred times, and showed 




134 



BEING A BOY. 



it confidentially to his favorite cousin, who had 
beaux of her own and had even "sat up" with 
them in the parlor. And from this sympathetic 
cousin John got advice as to what he should 
wear and how he should conduct himself at 
the party. 




^i-r^H, 


ll^#^> 


® 4fc w Jr 





XIII. 

JOHN'S FIRST PARTY. 

T turned out 
that John did 
not go after 
all to Cynthia 
Rudd's party, 
having bro- 
rough the ice on 
the river when he was 
skating that day, and, 
as the boy who pulled him out said, " come 
within an inch of his life." But he took care 
not to tumble into anything that should keep 
him from the next party, which was given with 
due formality by Melinda Mayhew. 




136 BEING A BOY. 

John had been many a time to the house of 
Deacon May hew, and never with any hesitation, 
even if he knew that both the deacon's daugh- 
ters — Melinda and Sophronia — were at home. 
The only fear he had felt was of the deacon's 
big dog, who always surlily watched him as he 
came up the tan-bark walk, and made a rush 
at him if he showed the least sign of wavering. 
But upon the night of the party his courage 
vanished, and he thought he would rather face 
all the dogs in town than knock at the front 
door. 

The parlor was lighted up, and as John stood 
on the broad flagging before the front door, by 
the lilac-bush, he could hear the sound of voices 
— girl's voices — which set his heart in a flutter. 
He could face the whole district school of girls 
without flinching, — he did n't mind 'em in the 
meeting-house in their Sunday best ; but he 
began to be conscious that now he was passing 



A NEW SPHERE. 1 37 

to a new sphere, where the girls are supreme 
and superior, and he began to feel for the first 
time that he was an awkward boy. The girl 
takes to society as naturally as a duckling does 
to the placid pond, but with a semblance of sly 
timidity ; the boy plunges in with a great splash, 
and hides his shy awkwardness in noise and 
commotion. 

When John entered the company had nearly 
all come. He knew them every one, and yet 
there was something about them strange and 
unfamiliar. They were all a little afraid of each 
other, as people are apt to be when they are 
well dressed and met together for social pur- 
poses in the country. To be at a real party was 
a novel thing for most of them, and put a con- 
straint upon them which they could not at once 
overcome. Perhaps it was because they were in 
the awful parlor, that carpeted room of hair- 
cloth furniture, which was so seldom opened. 



138 BEING A BOY. 

Upon the wall hang two certificates framed in 
black, — one certifying that, by the payment of 
fifty dollars, Deacon Mayhew was a life member 
of the American Tract Society, and the other 
that, by a like outlay of bread cast upon the 
waters, his wife was a life member of the A. B. 
C. F. M., a portion of the alphabet which has 
an awful significance to all New England child- 
hood. These certificates are a sort of receipt in 
full for charity, and are a constant and consoling 
reminder to the farmer that he has discharged 
his religious duties. 

There was a fire on the broad hearth, and 
that, with the tallow candles on the mantel- 
piece, made quite an illumination in the room, 
and enabled the boys, who were mostly on one 
side of the room, to see the girls, who were 
on the other, quite plainly. How sweet and 
demure the girls looked, to be sure ! Every 
boy was thinking if his hair was slick, and feel- 



SHYNESS IN SOCIETY. 139 

ing the full embarrassment of his entrance into 
fashionable life. It was queer that these chil- 
dren, who were so free everywhere else, should 
be so constrained now, and not know what to 
do with themselves. The shooting of a spark 
out upon the carpet was a great relief, and was 
accompanied by a deal of scrambling to throw 
it back into the fire, and caused much giggling. 
It was only gradually that the formality was at 
all broken, and the young people got together 
and found their tongues. 

John at length found himself with Cynthia 
Rudd, to his great delight and considerable em- 
barrassment, for Cynthia, who was older than 
John, never looked so pretty. To his surprise 
he had nothing to say to her. They had al- 
ways found plenty to talk about before, but now 
nothing that he could think of seemed worth 
saying at a party. 

" It is a pleasant evening," said John. 



I40 BEING A BOY. 

" It is quite so," replied Cynthia. 

" Did you come in a cutter ? " asked John, 
anxiously. 

" No ; I walked on the crust, and it was per- 
fectly lovely walking," said Cynthia, in a burst 
of confidence. 

" Was it slippery," continued John. 

" Not very." 

John hoped it would be slippery — very — 
when he walked home with Cynthia, as he de- 
termined to do, but he did not dare to say so, 
and the conversation ran aground again. John 
thought about his dog and his sled and his yoke 
of steers, but he did n't see any way to bring 
them into conversation. Had she read the 
" Swiss Family Robinson " ? Only a little ways. 
John said it was splendid, and he would lend it 
to her, for which she thanked him, and said, 
with such a sweet expression, she should be so 
glad to have it from him. That was encour- 
aging. 



CONVERSA TION. 1 4 1 

And then John asked Cynthia if she had seen 
Sally Hawkes since the husking at their house, 
when Sally found so many red ears ; and did n't 
she think she was a real pretty girl. 

"Yes, she was right pretty"; and Cynthia 
guessed that Sally knew it pretty well. But did 
John like the color of her eyes ? 

No ; John did n't like the color of her eyes 
exactly. 

" Her mouth would be well enough if she 
did n't laugh so much and show her teeth." 

John said her mouth was her worst fea- 
ture. 

"O no," said Cynthia, warmly; "her mouth 
is better than her nose." 

John did n't know but it was better than her 
nose, and he should like her looks better if her 
hair was n't so dreadful black. 

But Cynthia, who could afford to be generous 
now, said she liked black hair, and she wished 



142 BEING A BOY. 

hers was dark. Whereupon John protested 
that he liked light hair — auburn hair — of all 
things. 

And Cynthia said that Sally was a dear, good 
girl, and she did n't believe one word of the 
, story that she only really 
^3 ^ found one red ear at the 
yi^f husking that night, and hid 
-" that and kept pulling it 
out as if it were a new one. 
And so the conversa- 
tion, once started, went on as briskly as possible 
about the paring-bee and the spelling-school, 
and the new singing-master who was coming, 
and how Jack Thompson had gone to North- 
ampton to be a clerk in a store, and how Elvira 
Reddington, in the geography class at school, 
was asked what was the capital of Massachu- 
setts, and had answered " Northampton," and 
all the school laughed. John enjoyed the con- 




GAMES OF FORFEIT. 1 43 

versation amazingly, and he half wished that he 
and Cynthia were the whole of the party. 

But the party had meantime got into opera- 
tion, and the formality was broken up when the 
boys and girls had ventured out of the parlor 
into the more comfortable living-room, with its 
easy-chairs and every-day things, and even gone 
so far as to penetrate the kitchen in their frolic. 
As soon as they forgot they were a party they 
began to enjoy themselves. 

But the real pleasure only began with the 
games. The party was nothing without the 
games, and indeed it was made for the games. 
Very likely it was one of the timid girls who 
proposed to play something, and when the ice 
was once broken, the whole company went into 
the business enthusiastically. There was no 
dancing. We should hope not. Not in the 
deacon's house ; not with the deacon's daugh- 
ters, nor anywhere in this good Puritanic so- 



144 BEING A BOY. 

ciety. Dancing was a sin in itself, and no one 
could tell what it would lead to. But there was 
no reason why the boys and girls should n't come 
together and kiss each other during a whole 
evening occasionally. Kissing was a sign of peace, 
and was not at all like taking hold of hands and 
skipping about to the scraping of a wicked fiddle. 

In the games there was a great deal of clasp- 
ing hands, of going round in a circle, of passing 
under each other's elevated arms, of singing 
about my true love, and the end was kisses dis- 
tributed with more or less partiality according to 
the rules of the play ; but, thank Heaven, there 
was no fiddler. John liked it all, and was quite 
brave about paying all the forfeits imposed on 
him, even to the kissing all the girls in the 
room ; but he thought he could have amended 
that by kissing a few of them a good many 
times instead of kissing them all once. 

But John was destined to have a damper put 



A FASCINATING GAME. 145 

upon his enjoyment They were playing a most 
fascinating game, in which they all stand in a cir- 
cle and sing a philandering song, except one who 
is in the centre of the ring, and holds a cushion. 
At a certain word in the song, the one in the 
centre throws the cushion at the feet of some 
one in the ring, indicating thereby the choice of 
a mate, and then the two sweetly kneel upon the 
cushion, like two meek angels, and — and so 
forth. Then the chosen one takes the cushion 
and the delightful play goes on. It is very easy, 
as it will be seen, to learn how to play it. Cyn- 
thia was holding the cushion, and at the fatal 
word she threw it down, not before John, but 
in front of Ephraim Leggett. And they two 
kneeled, and so forth. John was astounded. He 
had never conceived of such perfidy in the female 
heart. He felt like wiping Ephraim off the face 
of the earth, only Ephraim was older and bigger 
than be. When it came his turn at length, — 



146 BEING A BOY. 

thanks to a plain little girl for whose admiration 
he did n't care a straw, he threw the cushion 
down before Melinda Mayhew with all the de- 
votion he could muster, and a dagger look at 
Cynthia. And Cynthia's perfidious smile only 
enraged him the more. John felt wronged, and 
worked himself up to pass a wretched evening. 

When supper came he never went near Cyn- 
thia, and busied himself in carrying different 
kinds of pie and cake, and red apples and cider, 
to the girls he liked the least. He shunned 
Cynthia, and when he was accidentally near 
her, and she asked him if he would get her a 
glass of cider, he rudely told her — like a goose 
as he was — that she had better ask Ephraim. 
That seemed to him very smart ; but he got 
more and more miserable, and began to feel 
that he was making himself ridiculous. 

Girls have a great deal more good sense in 
such matters than boys. Cynthia went to John, 



"SEEING" HER HOME. 1 47 

at length, and asked him simply what the matter 



was. John blushed, and said 
that nothing was the matter. 
Cynthia said that it would n't 
do for two people always to be 
together at a party ; and so 
they made up, and 
John obtained per- 
mission to "see" 
Cynthia home. 

It was after half 
past nine when the 
great festivities at 
the Deacon's broke 
up, and John 
walked home with 



W 



148 BEING A BOY. 

Cynthia over the shining crust and under the 
stars. It was mostly a silent walk, for this was 
also an occasion when it is difficult to find any- 
thing fit to say. And John was thinking all the 
way how he should bid Cynthia good night ; 
whether it would do and whether it would n't do, 
this not being a game, and no forfeits attaching 
to it. When they reached the gate there was an 
awkward little pause. John said the stars were 
uncommonly bright. Cynthia did not deny it, 
but waited a minute and then turned abruptly 
away, with " Good night, John ! " 

"Good night, Cynthia!" 

And the party was over, and Cynthia was 
gone, and John went home in a kind of dissatis- 
faction with himself. 

It was long before he could go to sleep for 
thinking of the new world opened to him, and 
imagining how he would act under a hundred 
different circumstances, and what he would say, 



AFTER THE PARTY. 



:49 



and what Cynthia would say ; but a dream at 
length came, and led him away to a great city 
and a brilliant house ; and while he was there 
he heard a loud rapping on the under floor, and 
saw that it was daylight. 




XIV. 

THE SUGAR CAMP. 

THINK there is no part of farming the 
boy enjoys more than the making of 
maple sugar ; it is better than " blackber- 
rying," and nearly as good as fishing. 
And one reason he likes this work is that 
somebody else does the most of it. It is a 
sort of work in which he can appear to be 
very active, and yet not do much. 

And it exactly suits the temperament of a 
real boy to be very busy about nothing. If 
the power, for instance, that is expended in 
play by a boy between the ages of eight and 
fourteen could be applied to some industry, we 
should see wonderful results. But a boy is like 



WASTED ELECTRICITY. 15 I 

a galvanic battery that is not in connection 
with anything ; he generates electricity and 
plays it off into the air with the most reckless 
prodigality. And I, for one, would n't have it 
otherwise. It is as much a boy's business to 
play off his energies into space as it is for a 
flower to blow or a catbird to sing snatches 
of the tunes of all the other birds. 

In my day maple-sugar-making used to be 
something between picnicking and being ship- 
wrecked on a fertile island, where one should 
save from the wreck tubs and augurs, and 
great kettles and pork, and hen's-eggs and 
rye-and-indian bread, and begin at once to 
lead the sweetest life in the world. I am told 
that it is something different nowadays, and 
that there is more desire to save the sap, and 
make good, pure sugar, and sell it for a large 
price, than there used to be, and that the old 
fun and picturesqueness of the business are 



152 BEING A BOY. 

pretty much gone. I am told that it is the 
custom to carefully collect the sap and bring 
it to the house, where there are built brick 
arches, over which it is evaporated in shallow 
pans, and that pains is taken to keep the leaves, 
sticks, and ashes and coals out of it, and that 
the sugar is clarified ; and that, in short, it 
is a money-making business, in which there is 
very little fun, and that the boy is not allowed 
to dip his paddle into the kettle of boiling 
sugar and lick off the delicious sirup. The 
prohibition may improve the sugar, but it is 
cruel to the boy. 

As I remember the New England boy (and 
I am very intimate with one), he used to be 
on the qui vive in the spring for the sap to 
begin running. I think he discovered it as 
soon as anybody. Perhaps he knew it by a 
feeling of something starting in his own veins, 
— a sort of spring stir in his legs and arms, 



THE SPRING STIR. 



153 



which tempted him to stand on his head, or 
throw a handspring, if he could find a spot of 
ground from which the snow had melted. The 
sap stirs early in the legs of a country boy, 
and shows itself in uneasi- 
ness in the toes, which 
get tired of boots, and want 
to come out and touch the 
soil just as soon as the 
sun has warmed it a little. 
The country boy goes bare- 
foot just as naturally as the 
trees burst their buds, which 
were packed and varnished 
over in the fall to keep the 
water and the frost out. 
Perhaps the boy has been 
out digging into the maple- 
trees with his jack-knife; at any rate, he is 
pretty sure to announce the discovery as he 




-J^^^H 



154 BEING A BOY. 

comes running into the house in a great state 
of excitement — as if he had heard a hen cackle 
in the barn — with, " Sap 's runnin' ! " 

And then, indeed, the stir and excitement 
begin. The sap-buckets, which have been stored 
in the garret over the wood-house, and which 
the boy has occasionally climbed up to look at 
with another boy, for they are full of sweet 
suggestions of the annual spring frolic, — the 
sap-buckets are brought down and set out on 
the south side of the house and scalded. The 
snow is still a foot or two feet deep in the 
woods, and the ox-sled is got out to make a 
road to the sugar camp, and the campaign be- 
gins. The boy is everywhere present, superin- 
tending everything, asking questions, and filled 
with a desire to help the excitement. 

It is a great day when the cart is loaded 
with the buckets and the procession starts into 
the woods. The sun shines almost unobstruct- 



THE STARTING SAP. 155 

edly into the forest, for there are only naked 
branches to bar it ; the snow is soft and be- 
ginning to sink down, leaving the young bushes 
spindling up everywhere ; the snow-birds are 
twittering about, and the noise of shouting and 
of the blows of the axe echoes far and wide. 
This is spring, and the boy can scarcely con- 
tain his delight that his out-door life is about 
to begin again. 

In the first place the men go about and tap 
the trees, drive in the spouts, and hang the 
buckets under. The boy watches all these 
operations with the greatest interest. He wishes 
that some time when a hole is bored in a tree 
that the sap would spout out in a stream as it 
does when a cider- barrel is tapped ; but it 
never does, it only drops, sometimes almost in 
a stream, but on the whole slowly, and the 
boy learns that the sweet things of the world 
have to be patiently waited for, and do not 
usually come otherwise than drop by drop. 



156 



BEING A BOY. 



Then the camp is to be cleared of snow. 
The shanty is re-covered with boughs. In front 
of it two enormous logs are rolled nearly to- 
gether, and a fire is built between them. 




Forked sticks are set at each end, and a long 
pole is laid on them, and on this are hung the 
great caldron kettles. The huge hogsheads 
are turned right side up, and cleaned out to 
receive the sap that is gathered. And now, if 
there is a good " sap run," the establishment is 
under full headway. 



THE SAP-BOILING 1 57 

The great fire that is kindled up is never let 
out, night or day, as long as the season lasts. 
Somebody is always cutting wood to feed it ; 
somebody is busy most of the time gathering 
in the sap ; somebody is required to watch the 
kettles that they do not boil over, and to fill 
them. It is not the boy, however ; he is too 
busy with things in general to be of any use 
in details. He has his own little sap-yoke and 
small pails, with which he gathers the sweet 
liquid. He has a little boiling-place of his 
own, with small logs and a tiny kettle. In the 
great kettles the boiling goes on slowly, and 
the liquid, as it thickens, is dipped from one 
to another, until in the end kettle it is reduced 
to sirup, and is taken out to cool and settle, 
until enough is made to " sugar off." To " su- 
gar off" is to boil the syrup until it is thick 
enough to crystallize into sugar. This is the 
grand event, and is only done once in two or 
three days. 



158 BEING A BOY. 

But the boy's desire is to "sugar off" per- 
petually. He boils his kettle down as rapidly 
as possible ; he is not particular about chips, 
scum, or ashes ; he is apt to burn his sugar ; 
but if he can get enough to make a little wax 
on the snow, or to scrape from the bottom of 
the kettle with his wooden paddle, he is happy. 
A good deal is wasted on his hands, and the 
outside of his face, and on his clothes, but he 
does not care ; he is not stingy. 

To watch the operations of the big fire gives 
him constant pleasure. Sometimes he is left 
to watch the boiling kettles, with a piece of 
pork tied on the end of a stick, which he dips 
into the boiling mass when it threatens to go 
over. He is constantly tasting of it, however, 
to see if it is not almost sirup. He has a 
long round stick, whittled smooth at one end, 
which he uses for this purpose, at the constant 
risk of burning his tongue. The smoke blows 



SUGARING-OFF. 1 5 9 

in his face ; he is grimy with ashes ; he is alto- 
gether such a mass of dirt, stickiness, and 
sweetness, that his own mother would n't know 
him. 

He likes to boil eggs with the hired man in 
the hot sap ; he likes to roast potatoes in the 
ashes, and he would live in the camp day and 
night if he were permitted. Some of the hired 
men sleep in the bough shanty and keep the 
fire blazing all night. To sleep there with 
them, and awake in the night and hear the 
wind in the trees, and see the sparks fly up to 
the sky, is a perfect realization of all the sto- 
ries of adventures he has ever read. He tells 
the other boys afterwards that he heard some- 
thing in the night that sounded very much like 
a bear. The hired man says that he was very 
much scared by the hooting of an owl. 

The great occasions for the boy, though, are 
the times of " sugaring-ofT." Sometimes this 



l60 BEING A BOY. 

used to be done in the evening, and it was 
made the excuse for a frolic in the camp. The 
neighbors were invited ; sometimes even the 
pretty girls from the village, who filled all the 
woods with their sweet voices and merry laugh- 
ter and little affectations of fright. The white 
snow still lies on all the ground except the 
warm spot about the camp. The tree branches 
all show distinctly in the light of the fire, 
which sends its ruddy glare far into the dark- 
ness, and lights up the bough shanty, the hogs- 
heads, the buckets on the trees, and the group 
about the boiling kettles, until the scene is like 
something taken out of a fairy play. If Rem- 
brandt could have seen a sugar party in a 
New England wood he would have made out 
of its strong contrasts of light and shade one 
of the finest pictures in the world. But Rem- 
brandt was not born in Massachusetts ; people 
hardly ever do know where to be born until it is 



THE SUGAR PARTY. l6l 

too late. Being born in the right place is a 
thing that has been very much neglected. 

At these sugar parties every one was expected 
to eat as much sugar as possible ; and those 
who are practised in it can eat a great deal. 
It is a peculiarity about eating warm maple 
sugar, that though you may eat so much of it 
one day as to be sick and loathe the thought 
of it, you will want it the next day more than 
ever. At the " sugaring-off" they used to pour 
the hot sugar upon the snow, where it con- 
gealed, without crystallizing, into a sort of wax, 
which I do suppose is the most delicious sub- 
stance that was ever invented. And it takes a 
great while to eat it. If one should close his 
teeth firmly on a ball of it, he would be una- 
ble to open his mouth until it dissolved. The 
sensation while it is melting is very pleasant, 
but one cannot converse. 

The boy used to make a big lump of it and 



1 62 BEING A BOY. 

give it to the dog, who seized it with great 
avidity, and closed his jaws on it, as dogs will 
on anything. It was funny the next moment 
to see the expression of perfect surprise on the 
dog's face when he found that he could not 
open his jaws. He shook his head ; he sat 
down in despair ; he ran round in a circle ; he 
dashed into the woods and back again. He 
did everything except climb a tree, and howl. 
It would have been such a relief to him if he 
could have howled. But that was the one 
thing he could not do. 




XV. 

THE HEART OF NEW ENGLAND. 




1 64 BEING A BOY. 

thing in the heart of the New England hills to 
feed the imagination of the boy, and excite 
his longing for strange countries. I scarcely 
know what the subtle influence is that forms 
him and attracts him in the most fascinating 
and aromatic of all lands, and yet urges him 
away from all the sweet delights of his home 
to become a roamer in literature and in the 
world, — a poet and a wanderer. There is 
something in the soil and the pure air, I sus- 
pect, that promises more romance than is forth- 
coming, that excites the imagination without 
satisfying it, and begets the desire of adventure. 
And the prosaic life of the sweet home does 
not at all correspond to the boy's dreams of the 
world. In the good old days, I am told, the boys 
on the coast ran away and became sailors ; the 
country boys waited till they grew big enough 
to be missionaries, and then they sailed away, 
and met the coast boys in foreign ports. 



IN A TREE- TO P. 1 65 

John used to spend hours in the top of a 
slender hickory-tree that a little detached it- 
self from the forest which crowned the brow 
of the steep and lofty pasture behind his 
house. He was sent to make war on the 
bushes that constantly encroached upon the 
pasture land ; but John had no hostility to 
any growing thing, and a very little bush- 
whacking satisfied him. When he had grubbed 
up a few laurels and young tree-sprouts, he 
was wont to retire into his favorite post of ob- 
servation and meditation. Perhaps he fancied 
that the wide-swaying stem to which he clung 
was the mast of a ship ; that the tossing forest 
behind him was the heaving waves of the 
sea ; and that the wind which moaned over the 
woods and murmured in the leaves, and now and 
then sent him a wide circuit in the air, as if he 
had been a blackbird on the tiptop of a spruce, 
was an ocean gale. What life, and action, and 



1 66 



BEING A BOY. 



heroism there was to him in the multitudinous 
roar of the. forest, and what an eternity of ex- 
istence in the monologue of the river, which 




river sparkled and 

danced and went on 
now in a smooth amber current, now 
fretted by the pebbles, but always with that 
continuous busy song. John never knew that 
noise to cease, and he doubted not if he stayed 
here a thousand years that same loud murmur 
would fill the air. 



THE ROARING RIVER. 167 

On it went, under the wide spans of the old 
wooden, covered bridge, swirling around the 
great rocks on which the piers stood, spread- 
ing away below in shallows, and taking the 
shadows of a row of maples that lined the 
green shore. Save this roar no sound reached 
him, except now and then the rumble of a wagon 
on the bridge, or the muffled far-off voices of 
some chance passers on the road. Seen from 
this high perch, the familiar village, sending its 
brown roofs and white spires up through the 
green foliage, had a strange aspect, and was 
like some town in a book, say a village nestled 
in the Swiss mountains, or something in Bo- 
hemia. And there, beyond the purple hills of 
Bozrah, and not so far as the stony pastures of 
Zoah, whither John had helped drive the colts 
and young stock in the spring, might be perhaps 
Jerusalem itself. John had himself once been 
to the land of Canaan with his grandfather, 



1 68 BEING A BOY, 

when he was a very small boy ; and he had 
once seen an actual, no-mistake Jew, a myste- 
rious person, with uncut beard and long hair, 
who sold scythe-snaths in that region, and about 
whom there was a rumor that he was once 
caught and shaved by the indignant farmers, 
who apprehended in his long locks a contempt 
of the Christian religion. O, the world had vast 
possibilities for John. Away to the south, up 
a vast basin of forest, there was a notch in the 
horizon and an opening in the line of woods, 
where the road ran. Through this opening 
John imagined an army might appear, perhaps 
British, perhaps Turks, and banners of red and 
of yellow advance, and a cannon wheel about 
and point its long nose and open on the valley. 
He fancied the army, after this salute, winding 
down the mountain road, deploying in the mead- 
ows, and giving the valley to pillage and to flame. 
In which event his position would be an excel- 



A BAD BOY. 169 

lent one for observation and for safety. While 
he was in the height of this engagement, per- 
haps the horn would be blown from the back 
porch, reminding him that it was time to quit 
cutting brush and go for the cows. As if there 
were no better use for a warrior and a poet in 
New England than to send him for the cows ! 
John knew a boy — a bad enough boy I dare 
say — who afterwards became a general in the 
war, and went to Congress and got to be a real 
governor, who used also to be sent to cut brush 
in the back pastures, and hated it in his very 
soul ; and by his wrong conduct forecast what 
kind of a man he would be. This boy, as soon 
as he had cut about one brush, would seek for 
one of several holes in the ground (and he was 
familiar with several), in which lived a white-and- 
black animal that must always be nameless in a 
book, but an animal quite capable of the most 
pungent defence of himself. This young aspi- 



170 BEING A BOY. 

rant to Congress would cut a long stick, with a 
little crotch in the end of it, and run it into the 
hole ; and when the crotch was punched into 
the fur and skin of the animal, he would twist the 
stick round till it got a good grip on the skin, 
and then he would pull the beast out ; and when 
he got the white-and-black just out of the hole 
so that his dog could seize him, the boy would 
take to his heels, and leave the two to fight it 
out, content to scent the battle afar off. And 
this boy, who was in training for public life, 
would do this sort of thing all the afternoon, and 
when the sun told him that he had spent long 
enough time cutting brush, he would industri- 
ously go home as innocent as anybody. There 
are few such boys as this nowadays ; and that 
is the reason why the New England pastures 
are so much overgrown with brush. 

John himself preferred to hunt the pugnacious 
woodchuck. He bore a special grudge against 



A PERSONAL HOSTILITY. IJl 

this clover-eater, beyond the usual hostility that 
boys feel for any wild animal. One day on his 
way to school a woodchuck crossed the road 
before him, and John gave chase. The wood- 
chuck scrambled into an orchard and climbed a 
small apple-tree. John thought this a most 
cowardly and unfair retreat, and stood under the 
tree and taunted the animal and stoned it. 
Thereupon the woodchuck dropped down on 
John and seized him by the leg of his trousers. 
John was both enraged and scared by this das- 
tardly attack; the teeth of the enemy went 
through the cloth and met ; and there he hung. 
John then made a pivot of one leg and whirled 
himself around, swinging the woodchuck in the 
air, until he shook him off; but in his depart- 
ure the woodchuck carried away a large piece 
of John's summer trousers-leg. The boy never 
forgot it. And whenever he had a holiday he 
used to expend an amount of labor and inge- 



172 BEING A BOY. 

nuity in the pursuit of woodchucks that would 
have made his fortune in any useful pursuit. 
There was a hill pasture, down on one side of 
which ran a small brook, and this pasture was 
full of woodchuck-holes. It required the assist- 
ance of several boys to capture a woodchuck. 
It was first necessary by patient watching to 
ascertain that the woodchuck was at home. 
When one was seen to enter his burrow, then all 
the entries to it except one — there are usually 
three — were plugged up with stones. A boy 
and a dog were then left to watch the open 
hole, while John and his comrades went to the 
brook and began to dig a canal, to turn the 
water into the residence of the woodchuck. 
This was often a difficult feat of engineering, 
and a long job. Often it took more than half a 
day of hard labor with shovel and hoe to dig the 
canal. But when the canal was finished and 
the water began to pour into the hole, the ex- 



DROWNED OUT, 173 

citement began. How long would it take to fill 
the hole and drown out the woodchuck ? Some- 
times it seemed as if the hole was a bottomless 
pit. But sooner or later the water would rise 
in it, and then there was sure to be seen the 
nose of the woodchuck, keeping itself on a level 
with the rising flood. It was piteous to see the 
anxious look of the hunted, half-drowned crea- 
ture as it came to the surface and caught sight of 
the dog. There the dog stood, at the mouth of 
the hole, quivering with excitement from his 
nose to the tip of his tail, and behind him were 
the cruel boys dancing with joy and setting the 
dog on. The poor creature would disappear in 
the water in terror ; but he must breathe, and 
out would come his nose again, nearer the dog 
each time. At last the water ran out of the 
hole as well as in, and the soaked beast came 
with it, and made a desperate rush. But in a 
trice the dog had him, and the boys stood off 



174 BEING A BOY. 

in a circle, with stones in their hands, to see 
what they called " fair play." They maintained 
perfect "neutrality" so long as the dog was get- 
ting the best of the woodchuck ; but if the latter 
was likely to escape, they " interfered " in the 
interest of peace and the " balance of power," and 
killed the woodchuck. This is a boy's notion of 
justice; of course, he'd no business to be a 
woodchuck, — an " unspeakable woodchuck." 

I used the word " aromatic " in relation to 
the New England soil. John knew very well 
all its sweet, aromatic, pungent, and medicinal 
products, and liked to search for the scented 
herbs and the wild fruits and exquisite flow- 
ers ; but he did not then know, and few do 
know, that there is no part of the globe where 
the subtle chemistry of the earth produces more 
that is agreeable to the senses than a New 
England hill-pasture and the green meadow at 
its foot. The poets have succeeded in turn- 



THE AROMATIC LAND. 1 75 

ing our attention from it to the comparatively 




barren Orient as the land of 
sweet-smelling spices and odor- 
ous gums. And it is indeed a 

constant surprise that this poor '<£ 

f 
and stony soil elaborates and 

grows so many delicate and aro- 
matic products. 

John, it is true, did 
not care much for 
anything that did 
not appeal to ^ J5 
his taste and s^fflnkv *^£ 

smell and delight in brilliant color ; and he trod 




176 BEING A BOY. 

down the exquisite ferns and the wonderful 
mosses without compunction. But he gath- 
ered from the crevices of the rocks the colum- 
bine and the eglantine and the blue harebell ; 
he picked the high-flavored alpine strawberry, 
the blueberry, the boxberry, wild currants and 
gooseberries and fox-grapes ; he brought home 
armfuls of the pink-and-white laurel and the 
wild honeysuckle ; he dug the roots of the fra- 
grant sassafras and of the sweet-flag ; he ate 
the tender leaves of the wintergreen and its 
red berries ; he gathered the peppermint and 
the spearmint ; he gnawed the twigs of the 
black-birch ; there was a stout fern which he 
called " brake," which he pulled up, and found 
that the soft end " tasted good " ; he dug the 
amber gum from the spruce-tree, and liked to 
smell, though he could not chew, the gum of 
the wild cherry ; it was his melancholy duty 
to bring home such medicinal herbs for the 



THE SWEET FERN. 1?? 

garret as the gold-thread, the tansy, and the 
loathsome " boneset " ; and he laid in for the 
winter, like a squirrel, stores of beechnuts, hazel- 
nuts, hickory-nuts, chestnuts, and butternuts. 
But that which lives most vividly in his memory 
and most strongly draws him back to the New 
England hills is the aromatic sweet-fern ; he 
likes to eat its spicy seeds, and to crush in his 
hands its fragrant leaves ; their odor is the 
unique essence of New England. 







XVI. 



JOHN'S REVIVAL. 




HE New 
England 
country-boy 
of the last 
generation 

^> never heard 

fa 

o f Christmas. 

There was no 

such day in his 

p calendar. If John 

fei^w* ever came across 

it in his reading, 

he attached no meaning to the word. 



CHRISTMAS. 



179 



If his curiosity had been aroused, and he 
had asked his elders about it, he might have 
got the dim impression that it was a kind of 
Popish holiday, the celebration of which was 
about as wicked as "card-playing," or being a 
"democrat." John knew a couple of desper- 
ately bad boys who were reported to play 
" seven-up " in a barn, on the haymow, and the 
enormity of this practice made him shudder. 
He had once seen a pack of greasy "playing- 
cards," and it seemed to him to contain the 
quintessence of sin. If he had desired to defy 
all Divine law and outrage all human society, 
he felt that he could do it by shuffling them. 
And he was quite right. The two bad boys 
enjoyed in stealth their scandalous pastime, be- 
cause they knew it was the most wicked thing 
they could do. If it had been as sinless as 
playing marbles, they would n't have cared for 
it. John sometimes drove past a brown, turn- 



180 BEING A BOY. 

ble-down farm-house, whose shiftless inhabitants, 
it was said, were card-playing people ; and it is 
impossible to describe how wicked that house 
appeared to John. He almost expected to see 
its shingles stand on end. In the old New 
England one could not in any other way so 
express his contempt of all holy and orderly 
life as by playing cards for amusement. 

There was no element of Christmas in John's 
life, any more than there was of Easter ; and 
probably nobody about him could have ex- 
plained Easter ; and he escaped all the demor- 
alization attending Christmas gifts. Indeed, he 
never had any presents of any kind, either on 
his birthday or any other day. He expected 
nothing that he did not earn, or make in the 
way of "trade" with another boy. He was 
taught to work for what he received. He even 
earned, as I said, the extra holidays of the 
day after the " Fourth " and the day after 



DREARY EXPECTATION. i8l 

Thanksgiving. Of the free grace and gifts of 
Christmas he had no conception. The single 
and melancholy association he had with it was 
the quaking hymn which his grandfather used 
to sing in a cracked and quavering voice, — 

" While shepherds watched their flocks by night, 
All seated on the ground." 

The "glory" that "shone around" at the end 
of it — the doleful voice always repeating, "and 
glory shone around " — made John as miserable 
as " Hark ! from the tombs." It was all one 
dreary expectation of something uncomfortable. 
It was, in short, " religion." You 'd got to have 
it some time ; that John believed. But it lay 
in his unthinking mind to put off the " Hark ! 
from the tombs " enjoyment as long as possi- 
ble. He experienced a kind of delightful wick- 
edness in indulging his dislike of hymns and 
of Sunday. 

John was not a model boy, but I cannot 



1 82 BEING A BOY. 

exactly define in what his wickedness consisted. 
He had no inclination to steal, nor much to 
lie ; and he despised " meanness " and stingi- 
ness, and had a chivalrous feeling toward little 
girls. Probably it never occurred to him that 
there was any virtue in not stealing and lying, 
for honesty and veracity were in the atmos- 
phere about him. He hated work, and he "got 
mad " easily ; but he did work, and he was al- 
ways ashamed when he was over his fit of 
passion. In short, you could n't find a much 
better wicked boy than John. 

When the " revival " came, therefore, one 
summer, John was in a quandary. Sunday 
meeting and Sunday school he did n't mind ; 
they were a part of regular life, and only tem- 
porarily interrupted a boy's pleasures. But 
when there began to be evening meetings at 
the different houses, a new element came into 
affairs. There was a kind of solemnity over the 



EVENING MEETINGS. 1 83 

community, and a seriousness in all faces. At 
first these twilight assemblies offered a little 
relief to the monotony of farm-life ; and John 
liked to meet the boys and girls, and to watch 
the older people coming in, dressed in their 
second best. I think John's imagination was 
worked upon by the sweet and mournful hymns 
that were discordantly sung in the stiff old par- 
lors. There was a suggestion of Sunday, and 
sanctity too, in the odor of caraway-seed that 
pervaded the room. The windows were wide 
open also, and the scent of June roses came in 
with all the languishing sounds of a summer 
night. All the little boys had a scared look, 
but the little girls were never so pretty and 
demure as in this their susceptible serious- 
ness. If John saw a boy who did not come to 
the evening meeting, but was wandering off with 
his sling down the meadow, looking for frogs, 
maybe, that boy seemed to him a monster of 
wickedness. 



1 84 BEING A BOY. 

After a time, as the meetings continued, John 
fell also under the general impression of fright 
and seriousness. All the talk was of "getting 
religion," and he heard over and over again that 
the probability was if he did not get it now he 
never would. The chance did not come often, 
and if this offer was not improved, John would 
be given over to hardness of heart. His obsti- 
nacy would show that he was not one of the 
elect. John fancied that he could feel his heart 
hardening, and he began to look with a wistful 
anxiety into the faces of the Christians to see 
what were the visible signs of being one of the 
elect. John put on a good deal of a manner 
that he " did n't care," and he never admitted 
his disquiet by asking any questions or standing 
up in meeting to be prayed for. But he did 
care. He heard all the time that all he had to 
do was to repent and believe. But there was 
nothing that he doubted, and he was perfectly 



A LONESOME EXTEND. 



185 



willing to repent if he could think of anything 
to repent of. 

It was essential, he learned, that he should 
have a " conviction of 
sin." This he earnestly 
tried to have. Other 
people, no better than 
he, had it, and he won- 
dered why he could n't 
have it. Boys and girls 
whom he knew were " un- 
der conviction," and John 
began to feel not only 
panicky but lonesome. 
Cynthia Rudd had been 
anxious for days and 
days, and not able to 
sleep at night, but now 
she had given herself up and found peace. 
There was a kind of radiance in her face that 




1 86 BEING A BOY. 

struck John with awe, and he felt that now 
there was a great gulf between him and Cyn- 
thia. Everybody was going away from him, and 
his heart was getting harder than ever. He 
could n't feel wicked, all he could do. And there 
was Ed Bates, his intimate friend, though older 
than he, a " whaling," noisy kind of boy, who 
was under conviction and sure he was going to 
be lost. How John envied him. And, pretty 
soon, Ed "experienced religion." John anxiously 
watched the change in Ed's face when he be- 
came one of the elect. And a change there 
was. And John wondered about another thing. 
Ed Bates used to go trout-fishing, with a tre- 
mendously long pole, in a meadow-brook near 
the river ; and when the trout did n't bite right 
off Ed would "get mad," and as soon as one 
took hold he would give an awful jerk, sending 
the fish more than three hundred feet into the air 
and landing it in the bushes the other side of 



A SINGING SAINT. 1 87 

the meadow, crying out, " Gul darn ye, I '11 learn 
ye." And John wondered if Ed would take the 
little trout out any more gently now. 

John felt more and more lonesome as one 
after another of his playmates came out and 
made a profession. Cynthia (she too was older 
than John) sat on Sunday in the singers' seat ; 
her voice, which was going to be a contralto, 
had a wonderful pathos in it for him, and he 
heard it with a heartache. " There she is," 
thought John, " singing away like an angel in 
heaven, and I am left out." During all his 
after life a contralto voice was to John one of 
his most bitter and heart-wringing pleasures. It 
suggested the immaculate scornful, the melan- 
choly unattainable. 

If ever a boy honestly tried to work himself 
into a conviction of sin, John tried. And what 
made him miserable was that he could n't feel 
miserable when everybody else was miserable. 



1 88 BEING A BOY. 

He even began to pretend to be so. He put 
on a serious and anxious look like the others. 
He pretended he did n't care for play ; he 
refrained from chasing chipmunks and snaring 
suckers ; the songs of birds and the bright 
vivacity of the summer time that used to make 
him turn handsprings smote him as a discor- 
dant levity. He was not a hypocrite at all, and 
he was getting to be alarmed that he was not 
alarmed at himself. Every day and night he 
heard that the spirit of the Lord would probably 
soon quit striving with him, and leave him out. 
The phrase was that he would "grieve away the 
Holy Spirit." John' wondered if he was not doing 
it. He did everything to put himself in the way 
of conviction, was constant at the evening meet- 
ings, wore a grave face, refrained from play, and 
tried to feel anxious. At length he concluded 
that he must do something. 

One night as he walked home from a solemn 



BY THE ROADSIDE. 1 89 

meeting, at which several of his little playmates 
had "come forward," he felt that he could force 
the crisis. He was alone on the sandy road ; 
it was an enchanting summer night ; the stars 
danced overhead, and by his side the broad and 
shallow river ran over its stony bed with a loud 
but soothing murmur that filled all the air with 
entreaty. John did not then know that it sang, 
" But I go on forever," yet there was in it for 
him something of the solemn flow of the eternal 
world. When he came in sight of the house, he 
knelt down in the dust by a pile of rails and 
prayed. He prayed that he might feel bad, 
and be distressed about himself. As he prayed 
he heard distinctly, and yet not as a disturbance, 
the multitudinous croaking of the frogs by the 
meadow-spring. It was not discordant with his 
thoughts, it had in it a melancholy pathos, as 
if it were a kind of call to the unconverted. 
What is there in this sound that suggests the 



190 



BEING A BOY. 



tenderness of spring, the despair of a summer 
night, the desolateness of young love? Years 
after it happened to John to be at twilight at a 
railway - station on the edge of the Ravenna 
marshes. A little way over the purple plain he 
saw the darkening towers ^0$s^~ 
and heard " the sweet bells ^ 
of Imola." The Holy Pon- ||v 

3 




tiff Pius IX. was born at Imola, and passed his 
boyhood in that serene and moist region. As 
the train waited, John heard from miles of 
marshes round about the evening song of mil- 
lions of frogs, louder and more melancholy and 
entreating than the vesper call of the bells. 
And instantly his mind went back — for the 



THE PLAINTIVE APPEAL. 191 

association of sound is as subtle as that of odor 
— to the prayer, years ago, by the roadside and 
the plaintive appeal of the unheeded frogs, and 
he wondered if the little Pope had not heard 
the like importunity, and perhaps, when he 
thought of himself as a little Pope, associated 
his conversion with this plaintive sound. 

John prayed, but without feeling any worse, 
and then went desperately into the house, and 
told the family that he was in an anxious state 
of mind. This was joyful news to the sweet 
and pious household, and the little boy was 
urged to feel that he was a sinner, to repent, 
and to become that night a Christian ; he was 
prayed over, and told to read the Bible, and 
put to bed with the injunction to repeat all the 
texts of Scripture and hymns he could think of. 
John did this, and said over and over the few 
texts he was master of, and tossed about in a real 
discontent now, for he had a dim notion that he 
was playing the hypocrite a little. But he was 



192 BEING A BOY. 

sincere enough in wanting to feel, as the other 
boys and girls felt, that he was a wicked sinner. 
He tried to think of his evil deeds ; and one 
occurred to him, indeed, it often came to his 
mind. It was a lie ; a deliberate, awful lie, that 
never injured anybody but himself. John knew 
he was not wicked enough to tell a lie to injure 
anybody else. 

This was the lie. One afternoon at school, 
just before John's class was to recite in geogra- 
phy, his pretty cousin, a young lady he held in 
great love and respect, came in to visit the 
school. John was a favorite with her, and she 
had come to hear him recite. As it happened, 
John felt shaky in the geographical lesson of 
that day, and he feared to be humiliated in 
the presence of his cousin ; he felt embarrassed 
to that degree that he could n't have " bounded " 
Massachusetts. So he stood up and raised his 
hand, and said to the schoolma'am, " Please, 
ma'am, I 've got the stomach-ache ; may I go 



AN AWFUL SIN. 1 93 

home ? " And John's character for truthfulness 
was so high (and even this was ever a reproach 
to him), that his word was instantly believed, 
and he was dismissed without any medical 
examination. For a moment John was delighted 
to get out of school so early ; but soon his guilt 
took all the light out of the summer sky and 
the pleasantness out of nature. He had to walk 
slowly, without a single hop or jump, as became 
a diseased boy. The sight of a woodchuck at a 
distance from his well-known hole tempted John, 
but he restrained himself, lest somebody should 
see him, and know that chasing a woodchuck 
was inconsistent with the stomach-ache. He 
was acting a miserable part, but it had to be 
gone through with. He went home and told 
his mother the reason he had left school, but he 
added that he felt " some " better now. The 
" some " did n't save him. Genuine sympathy 
was lavished on him. He had to swallow a 
stiff dose of nasty " picra," — the horror of all 



194 BEING A BOY. 

childhood, and he was put in bed immediately. 
The world never looked so pleasant to John, 
but to bed he was forced to go. He was excused 
from all chores ; he was not even to go after the 
cows. John said he thought he ought to go 
after the cows, — much as he hated the business 
usually, he would now willingly have wandered 
over the world after cows, — and for this heroic 
offer, in the condition he was, he got credit for 
a desire to do his duty ; and this unjust confi- 
dence in him added to his torture. And he had 
intended to set his hooks that night for eels. His 
cousin came home, and sat by his bedside and 
condoled with him ; his schoolma'am had sent 
word how sorry she was for him, John was such 
a good boy. All this was dreadful. He groaned 
in agony. Besides, he was not to have any sup- 
per ; it would be very dangerous to eat a morsel. 
The prospect was appalling. Never was there 
such a long twilight ; never before did he hear 
so many sounds out doors that he wanted to 



THE PUNISHMENT OF LYING. 1 95 

investigate. Being ill without any illness was a 
horrible condition. And he began to have real 
stomach-ache now ; and it ached because it was 
empty. John was hungry enough to have eaten 
the New England Primer. But by and by sleep 
came, and John forgot his woes in dreaming that 
he knew where Madagascar was just as easy as 
anything. 

It was this lie that came back to John the 
night he was trying to be affected by the revival. 
And he was very much ashamed of it, and be- 
lieved he would never tell another. But then 
he fell thinking whether with the "picra," and 
the going to bed in the afternoon, and the loss 
of his supper, he had not been sufficiently paid 
for it. And in this unhopeful frame of mind he 
dropped off in sleep. 

And the truth must be told, that in the morn- 
ing John was no nearer to realizing the terrors 
he desired to feel. But he was a conscientious 
boy, and would do nothing to interfere with the 



196 BEING A BOY. 

influences of the season. He not only put him- 
self away from them all, but he refrained from 
doing almost everything that he wanted to do. 
There came at that time a newspaper, a secular 
newspaper, which had in it a long account of 
the Long Island races, in which the famous horse 
"Lexington" was a runner. John was fond of 
horses, he knew about Lexington, and he had 
looked forward to the result of this race with keen 
interest. But to read the account of it now he felt 
might destroy his seriousness of mind, and — in 
all reverence and simplicity he felt it — be a means 
of " grieving away the Holy Spirit." He therefore 
hid away the paper in a table-drawer, intending 
to read it when the revival should be over. 
Weeks after, when he looked for the newspaper, 
it was not to be found, and John never knew 
what "time " Lexington made nor anything about 
the race. This was to him a serious loss, but 
by no means so deep as another feeling that 
remained with him ; for when his little world 



RELIGION NOT A "SCHEME.* 



197 



returned to its ordinary course, and long after, 
John had an uneasy apprehension of his own 
separateness from other people, in his insensi- 
bility to the revival. Perhaps the experience was 
a damage to him ; and it is a pity that there 
was no one to explain that religion for a little 
fellow like him is not a " scheme." 





XVII 

WAR. 



VERY boy who is 
good for anything 
is a natural sav- 
age. The scien- 
tists who want to 
study the prim- 
itive m an, 

and have so 
y-N much difficulty in finding 
g one anywhere in this so- 
phisticated age, could n't 



do better than to devote their attention to the 
common country-boy. He has the primal, vig- 



THE PRIMITIVE MAN. 1 99 

orous instincts and impulses of the African sav- 
age, without any of the vices inherited from a 
civilization long ago decayed or developed in an 
unrestrained barbaric society. You want to catch 
your boy young, and study him before he has 
either virtues or vices, in order to understand the 
primitive man. 

Every New England boy desires (or did 
desire a generation ago, before children were 
born sophisticated, with a large library, and 
with the word " culture " written on their brows) 
to live by hunting, fishing, and war. The mili- 
tary instinct, which is the special mark of bar- 
barism, is strong in him. It arises not alone 
from his love of fighting, for the boy is naturally 
as cowardly as the savage, but from his fondness 
for display, — the same that a corporal or a gen- 
eral feels in decking himself in tinsel and tawdry 
colors and strutting about in view of the female 
sex. Half the pleasure in going out to murder 



200 BEING A BOY. 

another man with a gun would be wanting if 
one did not wear feathers and gold-lace and 
stripes on his pantaloons. The law also takes 
this view of it, and will not permit men to shoot 
each other in plain clothes. And the world also 
makes some curious distinctions in the art of 
killing. To kill people with arrows is barba- 
rous ; to kill them with smooth-bores and flint- 
lock muskets is semi-civilized ; to kill them 
with breech-loading rifles is civilized. That na- 
tion is the most civilized which has the appli- 
ances to kill the most of another nation in the 
shortest time. This is the result of six thou- 
sand years of constant civilization. By and by, 
when the nations cease to be boys, perhaps they 
will not want to kill each other at all. Some 
people think the world is very old ; but here 
is an evidence that it is very young, and, in fact, 
has scarcely yet begun to be a world. When the 
volcanoes have done spouting, and the earth- 



THE WORLD YET YOUNG. 201 

quakes are quaked out, and you can tell what 
land is going to be solid and keep its level 
twenty-four hours, and the swamps are filled 
up, and the deltas of the great rivers, like the 
Mississippi and the Nile, become terra firma, 
and men stop killing their fellows in order to 
get their land and other property, then perhaps 
there will be a world that an angel would n't 
weep over. Now one half the world are em- 
ployed in getting ready to kill the other half, 
some of them by marching about in uniform, and 
the others by hard work to earn money to pay 
taxes to buy uniforms and guns. 

John was not naturally very cruel, and it was 
probably the love of display quite as much as of 
fighting that led him into a military life ; for he 
in common with all his comrades had other 
traits of the savage. One of them was the 
same passion for ornament that induces the 
African to wear anklets and bracelets of hide 



202 



BEING A BOY. 



an d of 
metal, and 
to deco- 
rate him- 

//i 
self with f 

tufts of 
hair, and 
to tattoo 
his body. 
In John's 
day there 

was a rage at school among 
the boys for wearing brace- 
lets woven of the hair of the 
little girls. Some of them 
were wonderful specimens of 
braiding and twist. These 
were not captured in war, 
but were sentimental tokens 
of friendship given by the 




>,^SsS\J- 



SAVAGE ORNAMENTS. 203 

young maidens themselves. John's own hair 
was kept so short (as became a warrior) that you 
could n't have made a bracelet out of it, or any- 
thing except a paint-brush ; but the little girls 
were not under military law, and they willingly 
sacrificed their tresses to decorate the soldiers 
they esteemed. As the Indian is honored in pro- 
portion to the scalps he can display, the boy at 
John's school was held in highest respect who 
could show the most hair trophies on his wrist. 
John himself had a variety that would have 
pleased a Mohawk, fine and coarse and of all 
colors. There were the flaxen, the faded straw, 
the glossy black, the lustrous brown, the dirty 
yellow, the undecided auburn, and the fiery red. 
Perhaps his pulse beat more quickly under the 
red hair of Cynthia Rudd than on account of 
all the other wristlets put together ; it was a 
sort of gold-tried-in-the-fire-color to John, and 
burned there with a steady flame. Now that 



204 BEING A BOY. 

Cynthia had become a Christian, this band of hair 
seemed a more sacred if less glowing possession 
(for all detached hair will fade in time), and if he 
had known anything about saints he would have 
imagined that it was a part of the aureole that 
always goes with a saint. But I am bound to 
say that while John had a tender feeling for this 
red string, his sentiment was not that of the 
man who becomes entangled in the meshes of a 
woman's hair ; and he valued rather the number 
than the quality of these elastic wristlets. 

John burned with as real a military ardor as 
ever inflamed the breast of any slaughterer of 
his fellows. He liked to read of war, of en- 
counters with the Indians, of any kind of whole- 
sale killing in glittering uniform, to the noise 
of the terribly exciting fife and drum, which 
maddened the combatants and drowned the cries 
of the wounded. In his future he saw himself 
a soldier with plume and sword and snug-fitting, 



A SOLDIER IN GLORY. 20$ 

decorated clothes, — very different from his some- 
what roomy trousers and country-cut rounda- 
bout, made by Aunt Ellis, the village tailoress, 
who cut out clothes, not according to the shape 
of the boy, but to what he was expected to grow 
to, — going where glory awaited him. In his 
observation of pictures, it was the common sol- 
dier who was always falling and dying, while 
the officer stood unharmed in the storm of bul- 
lets and waved his sword in a heroic attitude. 
John determined to be an officer. 

It is needless to say that he was an ardent 
member of the military company of his vil- 
lage. He had risen from the grade of corpo- 
ral to that of first lieutenant ; the captain was 
a boy whose father was captain of the grown 
militia company, and consequently had inher- 
ited military aptness and knowledge. The old 
captain was a flaming son of Mars, whose nose 
militia war, general training, and New England 



206 BEING A BOY, 

rum had painted with the color of glory and 
disaster. He was one of the gallant old soldiers 
of the peaceful days of our country, splendid in 
uniform, a martinet in drill, terrible in oaths, a 
glorious object when he marched at the head 
of his company of flintlock muskets, with the 
American banner full high advanced, and the 
clamorous drum defying the world. In this he 
fulfilled his duties of citizen, faithfully teaching 
his uniformed companions how to march by the 
left leg, and to get reeling drunk by sundown.; 
otherwise he did n't amount to much in the com- 
munity ; his house was unpainted, his fences 
were tumbled down, his farm was a waste, his 
wife wore an old gown to meeting, to which the 
captain never went ; but he was a good trout- 
fisher, and there was no man in town who spent 
more time at the country store and made more 
shrewd observations upon the affairs of his neigh- 
bors. Although he had never been in an asy- 



THE MILITARY COMPANY. 207 

lum any more than he had been in war, he 
was almost as perfect a drunkard as he was 
soldier. He hated the British, whom he had 
never seen, as much as he loved rum, from which 
he was never separated. 

The company which his son commanded, wear- 
ing his father's belt and sword, was about as 
effective as the old company, and more orderly. 
It contained from thirty to fifty boys, according 
to the pressure of " chores " at home, and it had 
its great days of parade and its autumn manoeu- 
vres, like the general training. It was an artil- 
lery company, which gave every boy a chance 
to wear a sword, and it possessed a small 
mounted cannon, which was dragged about and 
limbered and unlimbered and fired, to the immi- 
nent danger of everybody, especially of the com- 
pany. In point of marching, with all the legs 
going together, and twisting itself up and un- 
twisting, breaking into single-file (for Indian 



208 



BEING A BOY. 




fighting), and forming platoons, 
turning a sharp corner, and get- 
ting out of the way of a wagon, 
circling the town pump, fright- 
ening horses, stopping short in ^p|[ 
front of the tavern, with ranks 
dressed and eyes right and left, 
it was the equal of any mil- 
itary organization I ever 
saw. It could train better 
than the big company, and 
I think it did more good 
in keeping alive the spirit 
of patriotism and desire to 
fight. Its discipline was 
strict. If a boy left the 



DISCIPLINE AND UNIFORM. 209 

ranks to jab a spectator, or make faces at a 
window, or "go for" a striped snake, he was 
" hollered " at no end. 

It was altogether a very serious business ; 
there was no levity about the hot and hard 
marching, and as boys have no humor, nothing 
ludicrous occurred. John was very proud of 
his office, and of his ability to keep the rear 
ranks closed up and ready to execute any ma- 
noeuvre when the captain " hollered," which he 
did continually. He carried a real sword, which 
his grandfather had worn in many a militia cam- 
paign on the village green, the rust upon which 
John fancied was Indian blood ; he had various 
red and yellow insignia of military rank sewed 
upon different parts of his clothes, and though 
his cocked hat was of pasteboard, it was deco- 
rated with gilding and bright rosettes, and floated 
a red feather that made his heart beat with mar- 
tial fury whenever he looked at it. The effect 



210 BEING A BOY. 

of this uniform upon the girls was not a matter 
of conjecture. I think they really cared nothing 
about it, but they pretended to think it fine, and 
they fed the poor boys' vanity, — the weakness 
by which women govern the world. 

The exalted happiness of John in this military 
service I dare say was never equalled in any 
subsequent occupation. The display of the com- 
pany in the village filled him with the loftiest 
heroism. There was nothing wanting but an 
enemy to fight, but this could only be had by 
half the company staining themselves with elder- 
berry juice and going into the woods as Indians, 
to fight the artillery from behind trees with bows 
and arrows, or to ambush it and tomahawk the 
gunners. This, however, was made to seem very 
like real war. Traditions of Indian cruelty were 
still fresh in Western Massachusetts. Behind 
John's house in the orchard were some old slate 
tombstones, sunken and leaning, which recorded 



KILLED BY INDIANS. 211 

the names of Captain Moses Rice and Phineas 
Arms, who had been killed by Indians in the 
last century while at work in the meadow by 
the river, and who slept there in the hope of a 
glorious resurrection. Phineas Arms — martial 
name — was long since dust, and even the mortal 
part of the great Captain Moses Rice had been 
absorbed in the soil and passed perhaps with 
the sap up into the old but still blooming apple- 
trees. It was a quiet place where they lay, but 
they might have heard — if hear they could — 
the loud, continuous roar of the Deerfieldj and 
the stirring of the long grass on that sunny 
slope. There was a tradition that years ago an 
Indian, probably the last of his race, had been 
seen moving along the crest of the mountain, 
and gazing down into the lovely valley which 
had been the favorite home of his tribe, upon 
the fields where he grew his corn and the spark- 
ling stream whence he drew his fish. John used 



212 BEING A BOY. 

to fancy at times, as he sat there, that he could 
see that red spectre gliding among the trees on 
the hill ; and if the tombstone suggested to him 
the trump of judgment, he could not separate 
it from the war-whoop that had been the last 
sound in the ear of Phineas Arms. The Indian 
always preceded murder by the war-whoop ; and 
this was an advantage that the artillery had in 
the fight with the elderberry Indians. It was 
warned in time. If there was no war-whoop, 
the killing did n't count ; the artillery man got 
up and killed the Indian. The Indian usually 
had the worst of it ; he not only got killed by 
the regulars, but he got whipped by the home- 
guard at night for staining himself and his clothes 
with the elderberry. 

But once a year the company had a superla- 
tive parade. This was when the military com- 
pany from the north part of the town joined the 
villagers in a general muster. This was an in- 



CLANNISHNESS OF BOYS. 213 

fantry company, and not to be compared with 
that of the village in point of evolutions. There 
was a great and natural hatred between the 
north town boys and the centre. I don't know 
why, but no contiguous African tribes could be 
more hostile. It was all right for one of either 
section to " lick " the other if he could, or for 
half a dozen to "lick" one of the enemy if they 
caught him alone. The notion of honor, as of 
mercy, comes into the boy only when he is 
pretty well grown ; to some neither ever comes. 
And yet there was an artificial military courtesy 
(something like that existing in the feudal age, 
no doubt) which put the meeting of these two 
rival and mutually detested companies on a high 
plane of behavior. It was beautiful to see the 
seriousness of this lofty and studied condescen- 
sion on both sides. For the time everything 
was under martial law. The village company 
being the senior, its captain commanded the 



214 BEING A BOY. 

united battalion in the march, and this put John 
temporarily into the position of captain, with 
the right to march at the head and "holler"; 
a responsibility which realized all his hopes of 
glory. I suppose there has yet been discovered 
by man no gratification like that of marching 
at the head of a column in uniform on parade, 
— unless perhaps it is marching at their head 
when they are leaving a field of battle. John 
experienced all the thrill of this conspicuous au- 
thority, and I dare say that nothing in his later 
life has so exalted him in his own esteem ; cer- 
tainly nothing has since happened that was so 
important as the events of that parade day 
seemed. He satiated himself with all the de- 
lights of war. 




XVIII. 

COUNTRY SCENES. 

T is impossible to 
say at what age 
a New England 
country-boy be- 
comes conscious 
that his trous- 
ers-legs are too short, 
and is anxious about the part 
of his hair and the fit of 
his woman-made roundabout. 
These harrowing thoughts come to him later 
than to the city lad. At least, a generation ago 
he served a long apprenticeship with nature 
only for a master, absolutely unconscious of the 
artificialities of life. 




2l6 BEING A BOY. 

But I do not think his early education was 
neglected. And yet it is easy to underestimate 
the influences that unconsciously to him were 
expanding his mind and nursing in him heroic 
purposes. There was the lovely but narrow val- 
ley, with its rapid mountain stream ; there were 
the great hills which he climbed only to see 
other hills stretching away to a broken and 
tempting horizon ; there were the rocky pas- 
tures, and the wide sweeps of forest through 
which the winter tempests howled, upon which 
hung the haze of summer heat, over which the 
great shadows of summer clouds travelled ; there 
were the clouds themselves, shouldering up 
above the peaks, hurrying across the narrow 
sky, — the clouds out of which the wind came, 
and the lightning and the sudden dashes of 
rain ; and there were days when the sky was 
ineffably blue and distant, a fathomless vault of 
heaven where the hen-hawk and the eagle poised 



THE BOY'S IDEAL WORLD. 2\J 

on outstretched wings and watched for their 
prey. Can you say how these things fed the 
imagination of the boy, who had few books and 
no contact with the great world ? Do you think 
any city lad could have written " Thanatopsis " 
at eighteen ? 

If you had seen John, in his short and roomy 
trousers and ill-used straw hat, picking his bare- 
footed way over the rocks along the river-bank 
of a cool morning to see if an eel had " got on," 
you would not have fancied that he lived in an 
ideal world. Nor did he consciously. So far 
as he knew, he had no more sentiment than a 
jack-knife. Although he loved Cynthia Rudd 
devotedly, and blushed scarlet one day when 
his cousin found a lock of Cynthia's flaming hair 
in the box where John kept his fish-hooks, spruce 
gum, flag-root, tickets of standing at the head, 
gimlet, billets-doux in blue ink, a vile liquid in 
a bottle to make fish bite, and other precious 



2l8 BEING A BOY. 

possessions, yet Cynthia's society had no attrac- 
tions for him comparable to a day's trout-fishing. 
She was, after all, only a single and a very 
undefined item in his general ideal world, and 
there was no harm in letting his imagination 
play about her illumined head. Since Cynthia 
had "got religion" and John had got nothing, 
his love was tempered with a little awe and a 
feeling of distance. He was not fickle, and yet 
I cannot say that he was not ready to construct 
a new romance, in which Cynthia should be 
eliminated. Nothing was easier. Perhaps it 
was a luxurious travelling carriage, drawn by 
two splendid horses in plated harness, driven 
along the sandy road. There were a gentleman 
and a young lad on the front seat, and on the 
back seat a handsome pale lady with a little 
girl beside her. Behind, on the rack with the 
trunk, was a colored boy, an imp out of a story- 
book. John was told that the black boy was a 



SO UTHERN ROMA NCE. 2 1 9 

slave, and that the carriage was from Baltimore. 
Here was a chance for a romance. Slavery, 
beauty, wealth, haughtiness, especially on the 
part of the slender boy on the front seat, — 
here was an opening into a vast realm. The 
high-stepping horses and the shining harness 
were enough to excite John's admiration, but 
these were nothing to the little girl. His eyes 
had never before fallen upon that kind of girl ; 
he had hardly imagined that such a lovely crea- 
ture could exist. Was it the soft and dainty 
toilet, was it the brown curls, or the large laugh- 
ing eyes, or the delicate, finely cut features, or 
the charming little figure of this fairy-like per- 
son ? Was this expression on her mobile face 
merely that of amusement at seeing a country 
boy ? Then John hated her. On the contrary, 
did she see in him what John felt himself to be ? 
Then he would go the world over to serve her. 
In a moment he was self-conscious. His trousers 



220 BEING A BOY, 

seemed to creep higher up his legs, and he could 
feel his very ankles blush. He hoped that she 
had not seen the other side of him, for, in fact, 
the patches were not of the exact shade of the 
rest of the cloth. The vision flashed by him 
in a moment, but it left him with a resentful 
feeling. Perhaps that proud little girl would be 
sorry some day, when he had become a general, 
or written a book, or kept a store, to see him go 
away and marry another. He almost made up 
his cruel mind on the instant that he would never 
marry her, however bad she might feel. And 
yet he could n't get her out of his mind for days 
and days, and when her image was present, even 
Cynthia in the singers' seat on Sunday looked a 
little cheap and common. Poor Cynthia. Long 
before John became a general or had his revenge 
on the Baltimore girl, she married a farmer and 
was the mother of children, red-headed ; and when 
John saw her years after she looked tired and 



FISHING AND DREAMING. 221 

discouraged, as one who has carried into woman- 
hood none of the romance of her youth. 

Fishing and dreaming, I think, were the best 
amusements John had. The middle pier of the 
long covered bridge over the river stood upon 
a great rock, and this rock (which was known 
as the swimming-rock, whence the boys on 
summer evenings dove into the deep pool by 
its side) was a favorite spot with John when he 
could get an hour or two from the everlasting 
"chores." Making his way out to it over the 
rocks at low water with his fish-pole, there he 
was content to sit and observe the world ; and 
there he saw a great deal of life. He always 
expected to catch the legendary trout which 
weighed two pounds and was believed to inhabit 
that pool. He always did catch horned dace and 
shiners, which he despised, and sometimes he 
snared a monstrous sucker a foot and a half long. 
But in the summer the sucker is a flabby fish, 



222 BEING A BOY. 

and John was not thanked for bringing him 
home. He liked, however, to lie with his face 
close to the water and watch the long fishes 
panting in the clear depths, and occasionally he 
would drop a pebble near one to see how grace- 
fully he would scud away with one wave of the 
tail into deeper water. Nothing fears the little 
brown boy. The yellow-bird slants his wings, 
almost touches the deep water before him, and 
then escapes away under the bridge to the east 
with a glint of sunshine on his back ; the fish- 
hawk comes down with a swoop, dips one wing, 
and, his prey having darted under a stone, is 
away again over the still hill, high soaring on 
even-poised pinions, keeping an eye perhaps 
upon the great eagle which is sweeping the 
sky in widening circles. 

But there is other life. A wagon rumbles over 
the bridge, and the farmer and his wife, jogging 
along, do not know that they have startled a lazy 



UNDER THE BRIDGE. 223 

boy into a momentary fancy that a thunder- 
shower is coming up. John can see as he lies 
there on a still summer day, with the fishes and 
the birds for company, the road that comes down 
the left bank of the river, a hot, sandy, well-trav- 
elled road, hidden from view here and there by 
trees and bushes. The chief point of interest, 
however, is an enormous sycamore-tree by the 
roadside and in front of John's house. The 
house is more than a century old, and its timbers 
were hewed and squared by Captain Moses Rice 
(who lies in his grave on the hillside above it), 
in the presence of the Red Man who killed him 
with arrow and tomahawk some time after his 
house was set in order. The gigantic tree, 
struck with a sort of leprosy, like all its species, 
appears much older, and of course has its tradi- 
tion. They say that it grew from a green stake 
which the first land-surveyor planted there for 
one of his points of sight. John was reminded 



224 BEING A BOY. 

of it years after when he sat under the shade of 
the decrepit lime-tree in Freiberg and was told 
that it was originally a twig which the breath- 
less and bloody messenger carried in his hand 
when he dropped exhausted in the square with 
the word " Victory ! " on his lips, announcing thus 
the result of the glorious battle of Morat, where 
the Swiss in 1476 defeated Charles the Bold. 
Under the broad but scanty shade of the great 
button-ball tree (as it was called) stood an old 
watering-trough, with its half-decayed penstock 
and well-worn spout pouring forever cold, spark- 
ling water into the overflowing trough. It is 
fed by a spring near by, and the water is sweeter 
and colder than any in the known world, unless 
it be the well Zem-Zem, as generations of peo- 
ple and horses which have drunk of it would 
testify, if they could come back. And if they 
could file along this road again, what a proces- 
sion there would be riding down the valley ! 



AN ANTIQUE PROCESSION. 22$ 

antiquated vehicles, rusty wagons adorned with 
the invariable buffalo-robe even in the hottest 
days, lean and long-favored horses, frisky colts, 
drawing generation after generation, the sober 
and pious saints, that passed this way to meet- 
ing and to mill. 

What a refreshment is that water-spout ! All 
day long there are pilgrims to it, and John 
likes nothing better than to watch them. 
Here comes a gray horse drawing a buggy 
with two men, — cattle-buyers, probably. Out 
jumps a man, down goes the check-rein.. 
What a good draught the nag takes ! Here 
comes a long-stepping trotter in a sulky ; man 
in a brown linen coat and wide-awake hat, — dis- 
solute, horsey-looking man. They turn up, of 
course. Ah, there is an establishment he 
knows well ; a sorrel horse and an old chaise. 
The sorrel horse scents the water afar off, and 
begins to turn up long before he reaches the 



226 BEING A BOY. 

trough, thrusting out his nose in anticipation 
of the cool sensation. No check to let down ; 
he plunges his nose in nearly to his eyes in 
his haste to get at it. Two maiden ladies — 
unmistakably such, though they appear neither 
"anxious nor aimless" — within the scoop-top 
smile benevolently on the sorrel back. It is 
the deacon's horse, a meeting-going nag, with 
a sedate, leisurely jog as he goes ; and these 
are two of the " salt of the earth," — the brevet 
rank of the women who stand and wait, — going 
down to the village store to dicker. There 
come two men in a hurry, horse driven up 
smartly and pulled up short ; but as it is rising 
ground, and the horse does not easily reach 
the water with the wagon pulling back, the 
nervous man in the buggy hitches forward on 
his seat, as if that would carry the wagon a 
little ahead ! Next, lumber-wagon with load 
of boards ; horse wants to turn up, and driver 



CITY TRAVELLERS. 227 

switches him and cries " G'lang," and the 
horse reluctantly goes by, turning his head 
wistfully towards the flowing spout. Ah, here 
comes an equipage strange to these parts, and 
John stands up to look ; an elegant carriage 
and two horses ; trunks strapped on behind ; 
gentleman and boy on front seat and two 
ladies on back seat, — city people. The gen- 
tleman descends, unchecks the horses, wipes 
his brow, takes a drink at the spout and looks 
around, evidently remarking upon the lovely 
view, as he swings his handkerchief in an ex- 
planatory manner. Judicious travellers. John 
would like to know who they are. Perhaps 
they are from Boston, whence come all the 
wonderfully painted pedlers' wagons drawn by 
six stalwart horses, which the driver, using no 
rein, controls with his long whip and cheery 
voice. If so, great is the condescension of 
Boston ; and John follows them with an unde- 



228 BEING A BOY. 

fined longing as they drive away toward the 
mountains of Zoar. Here is a footman, dusty 
and tired, who comes with lagging steps. He 
stops, removes his hat, as he should to such 
a tree, puts his mouth to the spout, and takes 
a long pull at the lively water. And then he 
goes on, perhaps to Zoar, perhaps to a worse 
place. 

So they come and go all the summer after- 
noon ; but the great event of the day is the 
passing down the valley of the majestic stage- 
coach, the vast yellow-bodied, rattling vehicle. 
John can hear a mile off the shaking of chains, 
traces, and whiffle-trees, and the creaking of its 
leathern braces, as the great bulk swings along 
piled high with trunks. It represents to John, 
somehow, authority, government, the right of 
way ; the driver is an autocrat, — everybody 
must make way for the stage-coach. It almost 
satisfies the imagination, this royal vehicle ; one 



GYPSIES. 229 

can go in it to the confines of the world, — 
to Boston and to Albany. 

There were other influences that I dare say- 
contributed to the boy's education. I think 
his imagination was stimulated by a band of 
gypsies who used to come every summer and 
pitch a tent on a little roadside patch of green 
turf by the river-bank, not far from his house. 
It was shaded by elms and butternut-trees, and 
a long spit of sand and pebbles ran out from 
it into the brawling stream. Probably they 
were not a very good kind of gypsy, although 
the story was that the men drank and beat the 
women. John did n't know much about drink- 
ing ; his experience of it was confined to sweet 
cider ; yet he had already set himself up as a 
reformer, and joined the Cold Water Band. 
The object of this Band was to walk in a pro- 
cession under a banner that declared, — 

So here we pledge perpetual hate 
To all that can intoxicate : 



230 



BEING A BOY. 



and wear a badge with this legend, and above 
it the device of a well-curb with a long sweep. 
It kept John and all the 
little boys and girls from 
being drunkards till they 
were ten or eleven years 
of age ; though perhaps a 
few of them died meantime 
from eating loaf-cake and 
pie and drink- 
ing ice-cold ^ {7l^^ 
water at the 
celebrations 
of the Band. ^ 
The gypsy - 
camp had a jz&- ^-^s^^U** 

strange fascination for John, mingled of curiosity 
and fear. Nothing more alien could come into 
the New England life than this tatterdemalion 
band. It was hardly credible that here were actu- 




THE STRANGE CAMP. 23 I 

ally people who lived out doors, who slept in their 
covered wagon or under their tent, and cooked in 
the open air ; it was a visible romance transferred 
from foreign lands and the remote times of 
the story-books ; and John took these city 
thieves, who were on their annual foray into 
the country, trading and stealing horses and 
robbing hen-roosts and cornfields, for the mys- 
terious race who for thousands of years have 
done these same things in all lands, by right 
of their pure blood and ancient lineage. John 
was afraid to approach the camp when any of 
the scowling and villanous men were lounging 
about, pipes in mouth ; but he took more cour- 
age when only women and children were 
visible. The swarthy, black-haired women in 
dirty calico frocks were anything but attrac- 
tive, but they spoke softly to the boy, and told 
his fortune, and wheedled him into bringing 
them any amount of cucumbers and green 



232 



BEING A BOY. 



corn in the course of the season. In front of 
the tent were planted in the ground three 
poles that met together at the top, whence de- 
pended a kettle. This was the kitchen, and it 




was sufficient. The fuel for the fire was the 
drift-wood of the stream. John noted that it 
did not require to be sawed into stove-lengths ; 
and, in short, that the " chores " about this 



A BOHEMIAN MYSTERY. 233 

establishment were reduced to the minimum. 
And an older person than John might envy 
the free life of these wanderers, who paid 
neither rent nor taxes, and yet enjoyed all the 
delights of nature. It seemed to the boy that 
affairs would go more smoothly in the world 
if everybody would live in this simple man- 
ner. Nor did he then know, or ever after 
find out, why it is that the world only permits 
wicked people to be Bohemians. 




XIX. 

A CONTRAST TO THE NEW-ENGLAND BOY. 




NE even- 
ing at ves- 
per s in 
Genoa, at- 
tracted by a 
burst of mu- 
sic from the 
swinging 
curtain of 
the door- 
way, I en- 
tered a little church much frequented by the 
common people. An unexpected and exceed- 
ingly pretty sight rewarded me. 



A FESTIVAL OF TAPERS. 235 

It was All Souls' Day. In Italy almost every 
day is set apart for some festival, or belongs to 
some saint or another, and I suppose that when 
leap-year brings around the extra day, there is 
a saint ready to claim the 29th of February. 
Whatever the day was to the elders, the evening 
was devoted to the children. The first thing 
I noticed was, that the quaint old church was 
lighted up with innumerable wax-tapers, — an 
uncommon sight, for the darkness of a Catholic 
church in the evening is usually relieved only 
by a candle here and there, and by a blazing 
pyramid of them on the high altar. The use 
of gas is held to be a vulgar thing all over 
Europe, and especially unfit for a church or an 
aristocratic palace. 

Then I saw that each taper belonged to a 
little boy or girl, and the groups of chil- 
dren were scattered all about the church. 
There was a group by every side altar and 



236 BEING A BOY. 

chapel, all the benches were occupied by knots 
of them, and there were so many circles of 
them seated on the pavement that I could 
with difficulty make my way among them. 
There were hundreds of children in the church, 
all dressed in their holiday apparel, and all 
intent upon the illumination, which seemed to 
be a private affair to each one of them. 

And not much effect had their tapers upon 
the darkness of the vast vaults above them. 
The tapers were little spiral coils of wax, which 
the children unrolled as fast as they burned, and 
when they were tired of holding them they 
rested them on the ground and watched the 
burning. I stood some time by a group of a 
dozen seated in a corner of the church. They 
had massed all the tapers in the centre and 
formed a ring about the spectacle, sitting with 
their legs straight out before them and their 
toes turned up. The light shone full in their 



A RING OF CHERUBS. 237 

happy faces, and made the group, enveloped 
otherwise in darkness, like one of Correggio's 
pictures of children or angels. Correggio was a 
famous Italian artist of the sixteenth century, 
who painted cherubs like children who were 
just going to heaven, and children like cherubs 
who had just come out of it. But then, he 
had the Italian children for models, and they 
get the knack of being lovely very young. 
An Italian child finds it as easy to be pretty 
as an American child to be good. 

One could not but be struck with the pa- 
tience these little people exhibited in their occu- 
pation, and the enjoyment they got out of it. 
There was no noise ; all conversed in subdued 
whispers and behaved in the most gentle man- 
ner to each other, especially to the smallest, 
and there were many of them so small that 
they could only toddle about by the most judi- 
cious exercise of their equilibrium. I do not 



238 BEING A BOY. 

say this by way of reproof to any other kind 
of children. 

These little groups, as I have said, were 
scattered all about the church ; and they made 
with their tapers little spots of light, which 
looked in the distance very much like Correg- 
gio's picture which is at Dresden, — the Holy 
Family at Night, and the light from the Divine 
Child blazing in the faces of all the attendants. 
Some of the children were infants in the 
nurse's arms, but no one was too small to 
have a taper, and to run the risk of burning 
its fingers. 

There is nothing that a baby likes more 
than a lighted candle, and the church has un- 
derstood this longing in human nature, and 
found means to gratify it by this festival of 
tapers. 

The groups do not all remain long in place, 
you may imagine; there is a good deal of shift- 



THE HANDSOME BOY. 239 

ing about, and I see little stragglers wander- 
ing over the church, like fairies lighted by fire- 
flies. Occasionally they form a little procession 
and march from one altar to another, their 
lights twinkling as they go. 

But all this time there is music pouring out 
of the organ-loft at the end of the church, and 
flooding all its spaces with its volume. In 
front of the organ is a choir of boys, led by 
a round-faced and jolly monk, who rolls about 
as he sings, and lets the deep bass noise rum- 
ble about a long time in his stomach before 
he pours it out of his mouth. I can see the 
faces of all of them quite well, for each singer 
has a candle to light his music-book. 

And next to the monk stands the boy, — the 
handsomest boy in the whole world probably at 
this moment. I can see now his great, liquid, 
dark eyes, and his exquisite face, and the way 
he tossed back his long waving hair when 



240 



BEING A BOY. 




he struck into his part. He resembled the por- 
traits of Raphael, when that artist was a boy ; 
only I think he looked better than Raphael, 

and with- 
out trying, 
for he 
A ^ seemed to 
be a spon- 
yv v^taneou s 
sort of boy. 
And how 
that boy 
did sing ! 
Hewasthe 
soprano of 
the choir, 

and he had a voice of heavenly sweetness. 
When he opened his mouth and tossed back 
his head, he filled the church with exquisite 
melody. 







SINGING LIKE A LARK. 24 1 

He sang like a lark, or like an angel. As 
we never heard an angel sing, that comparison 
is not worth much. I have seen pictures of 
angels singing, — there is one by Jan and 
Hubert Van Eyck in the gallery at Berlin, — 
and they open their mouths like this boy, but 
I can't say as much for their singing. The 
lark, which you very likely never heard either, 
— for larks are as scarce in America as an- 
gels, — is a bird that springs up from the 
meadow and begins to sing as he rises in a 
spiral flight, and the higher he mounts the 
sweeter he sings, until you think the notes are 
dropping out of heaven itself, and you hear him 
when he is gone from sight, and you think 
you hear him long after all sound has ceased. 

And yet this boy sang better than a lark, 
because he had more notes and a greater com- 
pass and more volume, although he shook out 
his voice in the same gleesome abundance. 



242 BEING A BOY. 

I am sorry that I cannot add that this rav- 
ishingly beautiful boy was a good boy. He 
was probably one of the most mischievous boys 
that was ever in an organ-loft. All the time 
that he was singing the vespers he was sky- 
larking like an imp. While he was pouring 
out the most divine melody he would take the 
opportunity of kicking the shins of the boy 
next to him, and while he was waiting for his 
part he would kick out behind at any one 
who was incautious enough to approach him. 
There never was such a vicious boy ; he kept 
the whole loft in a ferment. When the monk 
rumbled his bass in his stomach, the boy cut 
up monkey-shines that set every other boy into 
a laugh, or he stirred up a row that set them 
all at fisticuffs. 

And yet this boy was a great favorite. The 
jolly monk loved him best of all, and bore 
with his wildest pranks. When he was wanted 



SINGING BY EAR. 243 

to sing his part and was skylarking in the 
rear, the fat monk took him by the ear and 
brought him forward ; and when he gave the 
boy's ear a twist, the boy opened his lovely 
mouth and poured forth such a flood of melo- 
dy as you never heard. And he didn't mind 
his notes ; he seemed to know his notes by 
heart, and could sing and look off like a 
nightingale on a bough. He knew his power, 
that boy ; and he stepped forward to his stand 
when he pleased, certain that he would be for- 
given as soon as he began to sing. And such 
spirit and life as he threw into the perform- 
ance, rollicking through the Vespers with a 
perfect abandon of carriage, as if he could sing 
himself out of his skin if he liked. 

While the^ little angels down below were 
pattering about with their wax tapers, keep- 
ing the holy fire burning, suddenly the organ 
stopped, the monk shut his book with a bang, 



244 BEING A BOY. 

the boys blew out the candles, and I heard them 
all tumbling down stairs in a gale of noise 
and laughter. The beautiful boy I saw no 
more. 

About him plays the light of tender memory ; 
but were he twice as lovely, I could never think 
of him as having either the simple manliness or 
the good fortune of the New England boy. 




1V 3 ***** 



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